Establishing the means for providing suitable representation of indigenous knowledge within The Dataverse Project

The Indigenous Data Network (IDN) is a national network of Aboriginal community-controlled organisations, university research partners, Indigenous businesses and government agencies and departments led by the Indigenous Studies Unit at the University of Melbourne.

The aim of the IDN is to support the governance of Indigenous data for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. A longer-term goal of the IDN is to provide culturally appropriate representations of indigenous knowledge. One area of effort is the potential use of TKLabels and TKNotices as a framework for such knowledge representation, based on similar work undertaken by Maui Hudson and colleagues in Aotearoa (New Zealand). The IDN is also working to establish a national Indigenous Data Catalogue, developed using semantic web technologies to federate and aggregate discoverable resources from partner organisations around Australia.

One target catalogue for the IDN to harvest is the Australian Data Archive's Dataverse catalogue. The ADA collection currently leverages the DDI Codebook standard for the representation of dataset content within its collection. The DDI Codebook v2.1, as it is implemented in Dataverse - includes the capacity for Dublin Core metadata that can be used to present information that a dataset contains content related to indigenous participants, such as keyword, subject and geography fielded metadata. There is no specific means for representing indigenous knowledge within the Dataverse catalogue.

ADA has an interest in establishing the means for providing a suitable representation of indigenous knowledge within Dataverse. Including: - link to and incorporate identified sources for indigenous knowledge representation, such as TKLabels and Notices - curation processes for managing the creation, reading, updating and deleting of metadata - present curated metadata (e.g. TKLabels and TKNotices) in catalogue records - allow external aggregators to harvest this metadata (preferably a standardised model that allows for multiple external parties to harvest)