About Research Vocabularies Australia
A national vocabulary service that aims to help everyone understand data in the same way.
Research Vocabularies Australia helps you access and use vocabularies. It also makes it possible for Australian research organisations to publish, re-purpose, create and manage their own defined vocabularies. Some vocabularies are hosted by the ARDC and are available directly through Research Vocabularies Australia. Others are hosted externally, with links provided to the vocabulary owner's webpage.
Need help finding a specific vocabulary? Find community-endorsed data standards that can help you describe and record your data.
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Researchers rely on accurate, consistent information to drive new scientific discoveries. However, inconsistent terminology, data silos, and difficulties in integrating datasets from different sources can make it challenging for researchers to find or analyse data.
Defined vocabularies are essential to standardise research terms and better communicate what the data is and what it is about. This helps researchers decide whether the data is relevant to their research question. More broadly, vocabularies help make the data FAIR — findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable — to maximise its impact.
Research Vocabularies Australia is designed for researchers and those who support, describe and discover research. This diverse group includes vocabulary managers, ontologists, data managers, librarians, and others who manage and organise research information.
The Research Vocabularies Australia portal provides a user-friendly platform where anyone interested can easily search for, browse through, and access a wide range of vocabularies.
You can also register with Research Vocabularies Australia to contribute to the community by describing or uploading your own vocabularies.
Over 450 community vocabularies are listed in Research Vocabularies Australia and more than 5,900 people use the portal.
Explore all user guidesThe Research Vocabularies Australia portal is brought to you by the ARDC. The ARDC is supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). Our goal for the Research Vocabularies Australia portal is to describe defined vocabularies relevant to Australian researchers.
We work with research organisations to enable software interaction with hosted vocabularies, and to develop the service in response to their needs.
If you want to describe or publish a vocabulary in the portal, contact us at services@ardc.edu.au, or complete the form on the 'Get In Touch' page.
Learn more about the ARDC