Outbreak!: Containing, translating and transmitting biosecurity grey literature

• Published in: Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association Vol. 73; no. 4; pp. 541 - 555
• Main Authors: Kneebone, Les, Hester, Susan M., Baumgartner, John, Sun, Hanzhang, Robinson, Andrew
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United Kingdom Taylor & Francis 01.12.2024; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Biosecurity; Controlled vocabularies; Graph databases; Grey literature; Institutional repositories; Metadata; Open access; Subject headings; Vocabularies & taxonomies; Web portals
• ISSN: 2475-0158; 2475-0166
• DOI: 10.1080/24750158.2024.2411643

Biosecurity research focuses on invasive species. The dissemination of biosecurity research is hampered by three major issues. First, biosecurity research is not always published and can be difficult to access. Second, biosecurity participants ask questions in different ways, with terminology varying between participants and the research literature. Third, it is difficult to identify overlaps and gaps in the research literature, partly due to access and translation issues. The Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA) is addressing these problems by developing The Biosecurity Risk Research Portal (Portal). In this paper we discuss a system that extracts and transforms open-access grey literature research to meet domain-specific information needs. We discuss new controlled vocabularies that support metadata extraction. We show how controlled vocabularies and repository services may be co-developed, ensuring practitioner information needs are met responsively. The Portal connects metadata sources including government, industry and research institutions where open access to full text is available. We describe functional modules, including metadata extraction, metadata harmonisation, tagging and transformation of metadata into graph-shaped data ready for analytic applications. We introduce controlled vocabularies, including the Biosecurity Thesaurus. We discuss the inputs to new vocabularies such as corpus analysis, survey data and biosecurity frameworks.