| EPSRC Reference: |
EP/X036383/1 |
| Title: |
Provenance Analytics Model for Research Software (PARS) |
| Principal Investigator: |
Packer, Dr H S |
| Other Investigators: |
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| Researcher Co-Investigators: |
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| Project Partners: |
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| Department: |
Sch of Electronics and Computer Sci |
| Organisation: |
University of Southampton |
| Scheme: |
New Investigator Award |
| Starts: |
01 May 2024 |
Ends: |
30 April 2026 |
Value (£): |
263,584
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| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
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| EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications: |
| No relevance to Underpinning Sectors |
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| Related Grants: |
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| Panel History: |
| Panel Date | Panel Name | Outcome |
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25 Sep 2023
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EPSRC ICT Prioritisation Panel Sept 2023
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Announced
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
Modern research is centered around publication, where peer review plays a pivotal role in assuring the quality of disseminated research. The research published is supported by a myriad of online services, allowing for published research to be searched and analysed based on a range of properties ranging from research area to authors. This honed process enables institutions, funding bodies, and the government to find, value, and use research.
Software has become a critical factor in research in all disciplines. While it provides significant effort to develop and maintain its existence is not well acknowledged in the publication eco-system and its value to external stakeholders is hidden. The Society of Research Software Engineering and the Software Sustainability Institute has sort to recognise and promote the role of software and software engineers in research. Despite these efforts, the value of software and its contributors are not visible to external scrutiny.
This project takes knowledge generated by the research process from different silos supporting research activities and integrates it into a single model expressing research activities, outputs, and contributors. The complex relationships in the research process can be expressed in provenance, which was designed to model complex processes in order to reason over. This model will build a more accurate knowledge base that can provide insight into the research process and evidence that can describe the value of research activities and contributors in context to academic publications. This can be used to describe the activity of research broadly to research bodies and institutions, or more granularly describing the work of an individual which can be used in promotion panels or support the search for employees.
Concretely, this work will model using provenance:
1) Research software, its development and social interactions;
2) Academic publications and their attributes;
3) Relationships between research software and academic papers.
The specific relationships modelled will be driven by stakeholder consultation and the NIA's research objections to provide a user-driven model to support both research-led and practical purposes. The graph structure of the provenance model provides benefits to the types of queries that can be asked of the data including temporal queries to support the investigation of phases of research, and it also reduces the complexity of queries because it will be possible to use one query instead of multiple queries across multiple sources with different standards and formats. While the data modelled in PARS already persists on the web, this data structure provides linked context about the development.
- Improve the rate of links between publication by 30%
- The number of papers with links research software from a particular field or conference per a year
- The number of papers published in that field or conference for that year
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Key Findings |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
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| Date Materialised |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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| Project URL: |
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| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.soton.ac.uk |