Open data system

ESN-CA will soon be able to contribute to and leverage ESIC’s open evidence-synthesis data system, or the open-data system and ODS for short. The ODS will make available interoperable data that are synthesis and AI ‘ready’ (drawing from ‘continuous evidence surveillance’ mechanisms) and that are synthesis-derived (e.g., findings from and risk-of-bias assessments of empirical studies). The ESIC website provides additional details about the ODS, including its current and planned capabilities.

The ODS leadership group and technical-delivery group will soon be onboarding sectoral and regional hubs, which will allow the hubs to:

• conduct continuous evidence surveillance, which includes daily ingestion of newly published empirical studies from OpenAlex (and later other sources) and mapping to sector and then to a sector-specific taxonomy (and soon the writing of structured abstracts where none exist)
• maintain ‘living evidence maps’
• use the synthesis-ready data, and leverage new developments through the ‘methods and process transformation,’ to create policy-scale living evidence syntheses.

Over time, the ODS technical-delivery group will be adding additional capabilities, including:

• export to and import from digital evidence-synthesis tools (DESTs)
• sectoral question banks
• synthesis-protocol management
• equity mapping.

They will also support AI-enablement of key steps in the evidence-synthesis process, as well as key steps in transformed methods and processes, as it can be shown to be done safely and responsibly.

ESN-CA is also keen to keep abreast of ESIC’s exploratory work with tech companies to advance work on ‘AI for policy,’ including using AI (or large-language models) to support localization assessments and mixing and matching many needed forms of local and global evidence. This frontier work could further revolutionize how we provide timely, demand-driven evidence support.