A Biosecurity Risk Research Portal to Inform Decision-Making

This Centre of Excellence for Biosecurity Risk Analysis (CEBRA) project harvests biosecurity research outputs from research, government and industry organisations and uses artificial intelligence to extract and identify concepts related to key biosecurity questions. The resulting database is a kind of semantic middleware that can be leveraged to create decision making tools such as visualisations and semantic search library interfaces.

The project addresses three key issues:

• Biosecurity research is not always published, or is not always easy to access
• Different terms are used to describe and search for biosecurity information
• Gaps and overlaps in biosecurity research need to be analysed and reported

To address these issues, the project develops:

• a collection of biosecurity research, sourced from open access repositories from across the biosecurity community
• taxonomies and concept schemes that describe the research, and are used to extract key concepts from the research
• service endpoints that allow development of analytical, reporting and search interfaces

To streamline and make research project development more transparent and scientifically robust, the project will help to identify gaps in biosecurity research and flag existing parallel work. Through a digital library searchable interface, users can access relevant innovations, technology, analytics, and insights from biosecurity research to proactively inform investments.