Cooperative development of a specialized portal for technology assessment with user-oriented, configurable ICT services based on distributed information resources

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Armin Grunwald; Dr. Leni Helmes
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 315300133

The project aims at improving information, communication and co-operation in the interdisciplinary field of technology assessment in German-speaking countries by creating a service-oriented, Internet-based architecture. Six information and communication services have been implemented so far. They are based on distributed, heterogeneous resources and rely on standardized interfaces. The services currently available are: 1) the openTA News service, 2) the openTA Calendar service 3) the openTA Publication service, 4) the openTA Alert service for new publications, 5) the openTA Blog, and 6) the openTA Members' portal for personal and institutional members of Network TA. The services can be configured and adapted so that they may be integrated into decentralized websites of the respective TA institutions and into the web-based working environments of scientists. OpenTA combines a centralized with a decentralized approach by leveraging service-oriented technologies and Web 2.0 applications, thus forming the innovative core of the project and defines its specific challenges. The specialized portal improves communication and co-operation among TA-scientists and to strengthen the TA-community at an institutional level. It supports teaching and training of TA and fosters the broad use of TA knowledge. After successfully establishing the basic infrastructure and six openTA services in the first project phase, the second funding phase will allow for the implementation of complementing services, including a research data service. The first version will relate referred data sets with articles of Technikfolgenabschätzung Theorie und Praxis, the most relevant journal on TA for the German-speaking community. This journal has now been published since 25 years. It will be transformed into an open access journal and will be integrated into the openTA portal and its services. Authority files and Linked Open Data (LOD) sources will be used to augment the openTA metadata, thus increasing the interoperability and data quality. The augmented and aggregated metadata used by openTA services will be exposed as LOD for re-use. The existing services of openTA will be evaluated from a user perspective in order to optimize their usability and further improve their functionality. Providing web-based administration interfaces will allow for the decentralization of the service administration, resulting in both simplified re-use of the software and improved sustainability of the openTA portal and its services. Further on, the project will explore whether crowdfunding could serve as a business model for particular customization or development tasks after the funding period ended. The achieved results of this project will be presented in a series of workshops and discussed both with experts and users. The feedback will be fed into the next steps of the development process.

• DFG Programme: Science Communication, Research Data, eResearch (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)