Version 0.9 (final draft). This application profile is under public consultation.
This wiki is still under construction and its contents are subject to change.
Link entities
- cfOrgUnit_Class — the classification of an organisation, e.g. university, research institute or SME.
- cfOrgUnit_OrgUnit — the relation between two organisations, such as an hierarchical relation between a university and a faculty.
- cfOrgUnit_ResPubl — the relation between an organisation and a result publication, e.g. the publisher.
- cfPers_Class — the classification of a person, e.g. pre or post nominals.
- cfPers_OrgUnit — the relation between a person and an organisation, such as an appointment as a researcher.
- cfPers_Pers — The cfPers_Pers link entity represents the relation between two persons, such as a doctoral supervisor.
- cfPers_ResPubl — the relation between a person and a result publication, e.g. the author.
- cfPersName_Pers — the relation between a person's name variant and a natural person, e.g. the maiden or married name.
- cfProj_Class — the classification of a project, e.g. project or programme.
- cfProj_OrgUnit — the relation between a project and an organisation , e.g. participant or coordinator.
- cfProj_Pers — the relation between a project and a person, e.g. manager or project officer.
- cfProj_Proj — the relation between two projects, e.g. programmes and underlying projects or successive projects.
- cfProj_ResPubl — the relation between a project and a result publication.
- cfResPubl_Class — the classification of a result publication, e.g. journal, conference or magazine article.
Introduction
Welcome to the NL CERIF documentation wiki, the national Dutch application profile of CERIF. This wiki contains relevant documentation needed to implement CERIF for applications targeted at the Dutch research information infrastructure.
About the Dutch CRIS landscape
Since the early 1990s, the Dutch research information landscape has shaped by the METIS Current Research Information System (CRIS). In such a system information on research projects, associated personnel, organisations, funding and output is administered which are then used in reports for e.g. management information and research evaluation.
Over the years, the development of the METIS system has been driven by requirements from the Dutch universities. This has resulted in a CRIS, tailored to the Dutch situation that is used by 100% of the Dutch universities and a select number of Research Institutes. It has indeed become the de facto standard Dutch CRIS.
In recent years the CRIS market has developed and a number of vendors (e.g. Avedas and Atira) have newly entered national markets, including the Dutch market. A number universities and university hospitals are contemplating or have already decided to acquire solutions from these ‘new’ market players. In addition universities of applied sciences (HBO) are developing a need for proper research administration of applied research and are, as a result, orienting themselves on the CRIS market as well. In short the application landscape likely to become increasingly heterogeneous.
The outsight for a heterogeneous application landscape has created the notion for the need for system independent interoperability standards to allow for the free exchange of research information and data portability. Such a standard opens the way for research institutions to choose product that best suits their business requirements without a creating a vendor lock-in on one hand, while creating a level playing field for vendors on the other hand.
About NL CERIF
In early 2012 a request has been articulated for the development of a national standard data model for research information.
Following this request, a SURF-led working group with experts on research information, METIS, and information architecture from universities, HBO, Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Dutch research council NWO has since worked on defining such a standard. The scope of such a standard would be the exchange of information between systems but not the database structure of the specific systems: this is viewed to be best left to the vendors and their software developers.
This work has resulted in NL CERIF, described by this document: a national Dutch application profile based authoritative domain standards translated into the Common European Research Information Standard (CERIF).
About CERIF
The Common European Research Information Formation (CERIF) is developed and maintained by euroCRIS. Based on work in the late 1980s the standard was first introduced with the definition of CERIF91.
Over the years the CERIF standard has developed from a rigid physical data model for the exchange of project information to an extensive logical data model describing a wide range of research associated entities (most notably Project, Person, Organisation and Results), a physical data model for the definition of databases and an XML schema for data exchange in more recent versions of CERIF.
As of CERIF 2006, the standard also includes a so-called semantic layer making it more suitable for adaptation to the local situation while still using a standard structure which may be mapped to different other usages.
The standard has found increasingly more adoption by vendors of CRISs, national communities (e.g. United Kingdom, primarily through a wide array of JISC-funded projects) and more recently, international projects (e.g. the EU-funded OpenAIREplus project).
