Enhancing the experience of the Regional Observatory of Research and Innovation of Tuscany, and in particular the Toscana Open Research portal. This is the goal of the memorandum of understanding signed by the Ministry of University and Research (MIUR) together with the Tuscany Region to extend Toscana Open Research at a national level and its use in supporting strategic thought and monitoring of policies supporting research.
In fact, to strategically enhance research and innovation, it is not enough to increase resources, but it is necessary to do so with targeted and informed planning. Therefore, it is necessary to equip oneself with contextualised data and analysis tools to make sure that the resources employed are used to best achieve the established goals.
Toscana Open Research provides access to a database on research and higher education among the most relevant at national level, which allows the cross-consultation of various open data sets relating to different components of the research system, from students to teachers and researchers, from European funded projects to university spin-offs.
Thanks to the use of semantic techniques, we guarantee not only the interoperability of data which would otherwise not be accessible in an integrated way, but also a transversal analysis, navigating between classifications and taxonomies of different nature, and thus allowing a much richer representation of the research from the point of view of its meaning.
With this in mind, Toscana Open Research uses machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques that make it possible to extract and categorise the topics covered in the documents produced by the researchers (such as publications and projects), thus allowing us to understand the contribution of research to the priority areas defined in the National Research Plan for the period 2015-2020.
The application of the Memorandum of Understanding will include collaboration with CINECA, thanks to whose support it will also be possible to analyse the results of research funded by MUR, in addition to that funded by the European Union and the Tuscany Region.
The Memorandum of Understanding is not the first case of nation-wide use of an experience gained in the context of Toscana Open Research. Last May, in fact, the ontology developed for Toscana Open Research became the national reference model for ontologies in the field of higher education and research, thanks to a collaboration between the Agency for Digital Italy (AgID), the Tuscany Region, the Sistema Toscana Foundation and SIRIS Academic.
