ELFI (Servicestelle für ELektronische ForschungsförderInformationen): A New Approach to Interoperability

Abstract

For over two decades, our ELFI system has been working in the field of research funding information. More than 160 customers from German research institutions and universities are currently using it. Our systems have always worked with web crawlers to collect relevant information quick and easily. The underlying data model has evolved over the years in dialogue with CERIF.

In 2018, we introduced our new software and created a sophisticated role model to separate unregistered users from non-customer users. We work with two types of registered users, a normal user profile used to conduct one-to-one searches, and the Research Manager profile, which can be assigned once per institution and used to pass preselected information to other systems as shops, CMS's and CRIS's with HTTP-based RESTful API. Research managers can define relevant selection criteria to be shared with all users of an institution. All IP networks of our customers are known, so that every request receives the appropriate answer. Our focus is on interoperability with other CRIS programs. Our integration with the underlying framework Liferay is very powerful. By using the Angular web framework with its modularity, it is easy to integrate selected information into customer websites and systems. In Münster we want to give some examples of how to use it efficiently.