Regional Research Portal UnityFVG: DSpace-CRIS interoperability with CERIF standard

Abstract

Friuli-Venezia Giulia "Regional Scientific System" includes three Public Universities that started in 2014 a common project UnityFVG for integration and exposition of their Research "entities”.

The UnityFVG Research Portal is based on DSpace-CRIS solution and uses CERIF-XML over OAI-PMH for harvesting the main entities (Researchers, Organizations, Publications) from the Institutional DSpaceCRIS systems, also exploiting their REST interface to enrich data exposed on the Portal. CERIF was chosen as the best option to send rich information to the portal in a standard reusable way.

In 2018 we started harvesting other entities (Research Groups, Public Engagement Events, Journals, Conferences, Datasets) and linking them to Researcher Profiles, developing a special interface to search and view Researchers’ “skills”.

All this data is collected and linked together using persistent identifiers like DOI, Handle, ORCID. The use of PIDs provides an effective response to a major challenge of the project: to collect plenty of information from different sources and to match it in unique entities/items without ambiguities or duplicates, representing the research life-cycle.

The whole project is based on free, open source software, and on the technical support of 4Science. DSpace-CRIS proved to be a robust and sustainable solution both for institutional CRIS and collective portals.