The Quest for Research Information

Abstract

Delivered at the CRIS2014 Conference in Rome; published in Procedia Computer Science 33 (Jul 2014).Contains conference paper (8 pages) and presentation (12 slides).Research information, i.e., data about research projects, organisations, researchers or research outputs such as publications or patents, is spread across the web, usually residing on institutional and personal web pages or in semi-open databases and information systems. While there exists a wealth of unstructured information, the limited amounts of structured data often are exposed following proprietary or less-established schemas and interfaces. Therefore, a holistic view on research information across organisational and national boundaries is not feasible and information is inconsistent and incomplete. On the other hand, web crawling and information extraction techniques have matured throughout the last decade, allowing for automated approaches of harvesting, extracting and consolidating research information into a more coherent knowledge graph. In particular the Linked Data community has provided a range of techniques, schemas and vocabularies which allow to represent and interlink research information in a more coherent manner. In this work, we give an overview of the current state of the art in research information sharing on the web and present initial ideas towards a more holistic approach for boot-strapping research information from available web sources

Research Intelligence (CRIS) and the Cloud: A Review

“…It must cope with virtual research environments (Brasse, 2017) and "knowledge on the web", i.e. the cloud of linked open data (Blümel et al 2014) or more generally, the "research content cloud", including the semantic web, above all Wikipedia via DBpedia (Ghirardi & Scipione, 2014), the "global digital object cloud" (Lambert, 2018) or simply the "Big Data" (Rivalle, 2012). presents the data model of the CRIS of the Trinity College of Dublin, with different external data sources (e.g.…”

“…The same argument is put forward by (Lambert, 2018), underscoring the increasing importance of "persistent identifiers for a wide range of entities in the research domain" in the "global digital object cloud" and the need to design research information systems in a way that they can deal with multiple identifiers, for instance, by means of a "federated identifier entity" added to the data model. A more formal model of cloud-based data is presented by (Blümel et al 2014), with seven categories of potential data sources: Each category has its own data sources, more or less reliable, and can be characterized with different degrees of internationality, completeness, reusability etc. In particular, institutional and personal websites "fulfill an important role in academia: the public documentation and communication of any kind of research results".…”

“…"Assuming that in the future highly individualised, heterogeneous web pages of researchers and institutions will be important sources of information about their activities, (the authors) propose to develop solid, easy-to-use software tools for the extraction and provision of structured research information. Such software tools can be used to crawl the web sites of universities and research institutions and to extract metadata from them, which is then complemented and consolidated with freely available databases and authority files" (Blümel et al 2014).…”

Roadmap to FAIR Research Information in Open Infrastructures

“…Traditionally, in order to maintain a wide array of research information consistent, wellstructured and up to date Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) have been developed. Over the past years, some countries like Norway (CRIStin), the Netherlands (NARCIS), the Czech Republic (IS VaVaI), Slovenia (SICRIS) and India (IRINS) have successfully implemented national CRIS systems (Blümel et al, 2014;Castro, 2020). In other countries like Finland, Peru, Croatia and Ukraine national CRIS systems have been under construction.…”

Added value in the context of research information systems

“…Ideally, research information should be available in a consistent, updated and open access manner, but the reality is different. Research data are distributed among organizational, personal, social and commercial websites and these data have various structures (Blümel et al, 2014). In other words, these data are just like islands owned by various persons and organizations and each of them have their own structure.…”