Specialist portal openTA goes into the second round

The German Research Foundation DFG funds the further development of the online portal of the German-speaking TA community. ITAS and FIZ Karlsruhe want to develop new services. A workshop on 16 November 2016 provides an opportunity for discussion.The Germa

open TA, the specialist portal of the Network Technology Assessment (NTA), has pooled a wide variety of information from the interdisciplinary world of technology assessment since 2014. The goal of the platform is to improve information, communication, and co-operation within the German-speaking TA community. The services already include not only daily news and events from the almost 50 member institutions of the Network TA (NTA), but also a comprehensive publication database and the service which informs on new publications in the broad field of technology assessment.

Publicly available research data and Linked Open Data

Starting in November 2016, the project funded by the German Research Foundation DFG and located at ITAS goes into the second round. FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure joined the project as new partner. Apart from the maintenance and further development of the existing services, the project partners also want to tackle tasks in the second funding phase that will further strengthen the open access character of the portal. For example, the archive of issues and articles of the journal Technology Assessment – Theory and Practice (TATuP) which is of great importance for the TA community shall be integrated into the openTA portal with improved access and relevant metadata. Also the publication of research data which is of great importance in research policy will be picked up. Finally the openTA data services shall be expanded with existing standard data and provided as "Linked Open Data" in the "semantic web". Like this, information on personal members of the NTA available at openTA could be complemented and expanded by additional information from publicly accessible, standardized directories for scientific authors and vice versa.

openTA workshop in Bonn

Also in the second development phase the project counts on the close co-operation with and support from the NTA members to cope with its ambitious work program. For a first discussion with the openTA co-operation partners and users from the NTA, the project team and the work group "Information and Communication" of the NTA invite to the 5th openTA workshop in Bonn on Wednesday, 16 November 2016 from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. The workshop is held in the run-up to the NTA annual meeting and the NTA7 conference at the same venue. (03.11.2016)

Further links

  • Registration for the openTA workshop in Bonn
  • Further information on the workshop