Asset Base

The UKTRC asset base represents a major innovation for the transport and wider social science research communities. The development of the asset base is led by Professor John Polak at Imperial College London. This component of UKTRC has a number of specific objectives:

  • To facilitate access to transport research assets (literature, data, methods and people) for researchers from other academic disciplines
  • To likewise facilitate and improve the access of transport researchers to the assets of social science and related academic areas
  • To accelerate the propagation of new methods and ideas across disciplinary boundaries
  • To ensure the effective organisation, preservation and growth of UKTRC research outputs
  • Develop a knowledge archive of (links to) relevant academic and grey literature (along the lines of RePec and arXiv.org)
  • Develop customised bibliographic search tools, working in collaboration with existing and emerging bibliographic archives and publishers
  • Create a searchable inventory of relevant data assets
  • Create web-based academic communities to stimulate innovation and cross-fertilisation (along the lines of EconTalk.org)

A significant component of the added value that UKTRC brings to the transport research, practitioner and policy community lies in the assets that it develops from its own activities and acquires from other agencies through the networks and support that it develops – including accessing a wide range of grey literature and data sets held by agencies. Therefore, a key objective of the UKTRC to create an asset base consisting of web-based tools for the organisation, discovery and retrieval of knowledge, data and methods across the full range of disciplines relevant to the activities of UKTRC, in order to support both the long term research projects and the transport research community as a whole. A particular focus of the asset base, and one that is critical to successful multi-disciplinary working, is to facilitate access to transport research assets for those from other social science disciplines embarking on transport research for the first time, and also to enable existing transport researchers to identify and access research assets in other fields that might be relevant to their work. Providing access to parts of the asset base by consultants and other practitioners assists in rapidly spreading best practice across the transport profession.

 

METHODS

The UKTRC asset base consists of three interlinked web-based toolsets.

  1. Knowledge

    One of the key challenges confronting researchers working in multidisciplinary areas or who are seeking to gain insights into problems in one domain using methods from another, is accessing relevant literature (including grey literature), which tends, by definition, to be organised and presented along traditional disciplinary demarcations.
    The UKTRC addresses this issue by developing:

    • A knowledge archive, along the lines of the RePec in economics or the arXiv.org e-Print service in the mathematical sciences, to provide access to relevant published research from across transport and the social sciences, including a large grey literature of reports, prepared in the main by consultants or in-house researchers, for local and central government, or private sector companies.
    • Tools to enable users to have much more flexible access to existing commercial bibliographic databases and e-publishing portals (such as ScienceDirect).

    This work draws strongly on the open source tools and methods developed by the EPSRC and ESRC e-Science research communities.

  2. Data

    A previous study for EPSRC led by Imperial College London and Napier found that a perceived lack of data among researchers in the transport community was mainly a result of lack of awareness of what is available, rather than a data deficiency per se. Similar, or indeed greater, problems of data discovery will exist for researchers moving across disciplinary boundaries. The UKTRC therefore creates tools to enable the discovery and retrieval of a wide range of transport related data assets. The aim is not to duplicate data repository functions such as those provided by the ESDS or existing transport archives, but rather to facilitate substantially enhanced access to existing and new data assets.
    This is not to suggest that there may not be a requirement for the collection of new data sets to tackle some high priority policy issues where an existing deficiency has been identified; for example, the social science focus of UKTRC calls for difficult-to-obtain data on, for example, the impact of household context on transport decisions.

  3. People and Methods

    There is often a 10-20 year lag between a method being developed in one discipline (e.g. non-parametric methods in econometrics) and its take-up by transport researchers. Here UKTRC plays a valuable role in scanning other disciplines for new tools and methods relevant to transport research, and raising awareness of their existence – thereby cutting diffusion times by decades. Working in collaboration with the scanning exercises, we are developing user-contribution based tools to enable the web-communities to identify and propagate methodological innovation. This work also provides an important input to the UKTRC networking activities.