Information systems of research funding agencies in the "era of the Big Data". The case study of the Research Information System of the European Research Council

Abstract

The European Research Council (ERC) was established in 2006 to support and strengthen excellent frontier research in Europe. Since its beginning, it has received and evaluated over 32,000 proposals and funded more than 2,500 projects (as of June 2012). To assist in its effort to account for the added-value of its funding activities, the ERC is developing a CERIF-compliant-research information system. It is conceived as an integrated platform which combines several tools to support the gathering, management and analysis of data on results of funded projects. The distinctive features of the ERC system is that it makes extensive use of semantic web opportunities and machine learning techniques to minimize the burden on funded researchers. In this paper, the rationale and main functionalities of the system are presented.