CRIS + Repositories: Setting the Scene

Keith G Jeffery

President euroCRIS

www.eurocris.org

Structure

• Introduction

• Requirement

• Technologies

• Architectures

• Purpose

Introduction: Speaker

• Director International Relations

• Previously Director IT– 360000 users, 1100 servers, 8 Pb data /

year, 140 staff

• CRIS – CERIF

• e-Science

• Open access

Introduction: euroCRIS• Purpose

– Not for profit organisation registered in Netherlands– Mandated by EC to maintain, develop, promote CERIF– Independent advice and expertise

• Constituency– Members in all continents except Africa and Antarctica– Strategic partners: ALLEA, ICSU/CODATA, EARMA, ESF, APA, JISC, ERCIM,

CASRAI (and strong links to EC)

• Success– CERIF now nationally approved standard in 8 countries and widely used in

many more– 4 commercial companies offer CERIF-compliant CRIS systems– 2 more developing CERIF-compliant versions of their offerings

The Requirement• Research managers

– Evaluation– Comparison– Strategic management– Finding reviewers

• Researchers– Access to research information including scholarly publications)– Publicity (webpages, CV, bibliography)– Semi-automated research proposals, publications, evaluation– Cooperation (integrated with intercommunication)

• Innovators– Knowledge and technology transfer– leading to wealth-creation and improvement in the quality of life

• Public– Usually via the media

Project

Person / CV

Institution

Event

Equipment

Books

Journal/article

PatentResearch

Group

Publisher

Information of Interest

The Technologies• CRIS

– Emerged 1960s from research management world– Early systems ‘catalog card’ like (flat metadata)– 1990s to now formal syntax and declared semantics (CERIF) in fully connected

graph model of (meta)data– Cover all aspects of research information– Usually do not cover scholarly publication objects (but do cover the metadata)– Used for management queries retrieving groups of instances for further processing

• Repositories– Emerged 1990s from publication world (ArXiv, CogPrints)– Based on ‘catalog card concept’ (often DC) plus full text (multimedia) – ‘flat’

metadata model and objects– Cover scholarly publications (and sometimes datasets etc)– Used for access to individual instances

Equipment

ProjectProject OrganisationOrganisation

Service

FundingProgramme

Patent

Skills

CV

Product

Event

PersonPerson

Classification(Semantics)

Classification(Semantics)

Publication

CERIF-CRIS

Common European Research Information Format

Equipment

ProjectProject OrganisationOrganisation

Service

FundingProgramme

Patent

Skills

CV

Product

Event

PersonPerson

Classification(Semantics)

Classification(Semantics)

Publication

REPOSITORY

As author

bibliographic

As address

Full-text or multimedia scholarly publication

The Architectures: IntentThe intent of the architectures is • To meet the requirements defined previously for

– Research managers– Researchers– Innovatators– Public (via media)

• By providing storage for and access to– Research information (meta)data– Full text / multimedia scholarly publications– Research datasets / software

• Including interoperation – across systems of research funding and research performing organisations

Architectures: Models• CRIS alone

– Integrated holistic solution including full text/multimedia objects and research datasets

• Repository alone– ‘catalog card’ metadata plus scholarly publication full text/multimedia

objects

• CRIS + Repository– CRIS provides research contextual information– Repository provides full text/hypermedia objects– BUT where does the metadata for the publication reside? euroCRIS recommends: in the CERIF-CRIS to link up with the

contextual information

Architectures: Variants

• CRIS + filestore(s) – for full text/multimedia and datasets/software– Metadata in the CRIS, objects in the filestore

• Repository extended metadata with CRIS elements– Extended metadata in the repository– objects in the repository

Architecture: Recommended

CERIF CRIS (meta)data

Repository of objects (full-text / multimedia)

Metadata for one publication within context of projects, organisation, person etc

One publication full text / multimedia

Note: metadata in the CERIF-CRIS to have it in context for management decision-making and researcher enhanced information

Purpose of Seminar

• To amplify descriptions / characterisations of– Requirements– Technologies– Architectures

• To discuss optimal architecture(s) to meet requirements

• To map out a way forward to obtain best offerings for the research community