EuroCRIS holds a scientific conference every two years, and the latest was in Aalborg, Denmark on 2-5 June this year. It was hosted by Aalborg University and took place during a heatwave – I can still recall the blue skies and long days of sunshine.
I gave a paper co-authored with Richard Gartner on ‘Modelling national research assessments in CERIF’. This reported on the R4R work to map the British assessment system to CERIF using the CERIF4REF schema and considered the interplay between repositories and research information systems. I also led a workshop with Brigitte Jörg of DFKI, Germany on research assessments in different countries; case studies on systems in Britain (me), Germany (Maximilian Stempfhuber) and Finland (Aija Kaitera) were presented, then we had an open discussion about the types of information/data that are required, and looked for similarities across borders. The notes go to the CERIF Task Group to see where CERIF may need to be expanded. And I joined the final panel to give the evaluation perspective to the conference’s summary.
Other papers gave insight into national CRIS – either in development (such as Omid Fatemi on the Iranian CRIS) or being improved. Elly Dijk stressed the importance of consulting users and potential of the Dutch NARCIS system, while Greta Lingjærde and Andora Sjøgren explained how the Norwegian system is becoming a truly national system rather than localised ones in each university: this is reflected in a change of name from Frida to Cristin to represent the ‘CRIS in Norway’.
The British approach in the two presentations by William Nixon of Glasgow and Anna Clements of St Andrews concentrated on the opportunities for institutional collaboration between the CRIS and IR systems. The challenges were as much cultural and administrative as technical, since interoperability requires data owners in different parts of the organisation to see that ‘their’ data is a corporate asset of use beyond their department. REF is not the only driver for better information management at the institutional level.
Two challenging but stimulating presentations were given by Geert van Grootel and Keith Jeffery. Van Grootel explained how business semantics management was used on the Flemish national CRIS (FRIS); domain specialists describe processes using natural language and software translates these conceptual facts into the entity-relationship model used by CERIF. It aims to overcome the steep learning curve in understanding the E-R model and translating that into a conceptual layer.
Jeffery in a presentation on CRIS and DataSpaces explained how different CRIS could be made to interoperate by generating a global schema for any group of CRIS based on the canonical CERIF schema. He likened this process to epitaxial growth of crystals where ions in a crystal environment can attach themselves to the crystal in a congruent way. We are trying something similar in R4R whereby we map institutional data sources to the CERIF4REF schema, which can then generate CERIF-compliant data.
The conference was a good opportunity to hear about developments in CRIS, especially since they are still quite novel in British universities. A concurrent workshop looked at the relations between CRIS and IR, based on the work of the Knowledge Exchange group in four European countries, and these relations were a major interest in the conference. The euroCRIS membership also seems extremely friendly, and would welcome new voices from the UK.
Abstracts are available at the conference website www.cris2010.org.
This post is my last, since I am leaving King’s today for a short career break. Richard Gartner takes over as project manager. My very best wishes to all involved in the project for a successful conclusion to R4R. It has been a pleasure working on this project.
Stephen Grace
