Re: Convergent IR Deposit Mandates vs. Divergent CR Deposit Mandates

From: Jeffery, KG (Keith) <"Jeffery,>
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:05:02 +0100

All -

I know that at this point Alma and Stevan would expect me to point out
that - as well as OA IRs - there are other systems maintained by funders
and research institutions.

These are called CRIS (Current Research Information Systems)and there is
an EU Recommendation to member states (i.e. a standard) named CERIF
(Common European Research Information Format) which has formal syntax
and defined semantics and is thus ideal for interoperation even in a
multilingual environment.

Since researchers move quite a lot and may have multiple (simultaneous
or sequential) affiliations to research organisations, funders etc the
data model has to have timestamped role-based relationships between
major entities like persons, institutions, publications etc. This is
much more expressive than DC-type metadata.

CERIF also has the necessary attributes to generate appropriate
publication metadata in Dublin Core, MARC and the various bibliographic
reference standards (like APA, Vancouver, Chicago, BibTex etc).
Finally, CERIF also provides context for the research i.e. research
project information and what (if any) facilities and equipment used,
events attended etc. Details at www.eurocris.org/cerif

So instead of trying to add (non formal (or semi-sructured)syntax and
variable semantics, DC-type) metadata into IRs I recommend strongly
using the data structure of CERIF and link it to the full-text
(multimedia) in the IR. Of course the same technique works for research
datasets and software etc etc

Best
Keith
Received on Sat Jul 26 2008 - 14:43:28 BST