Linking normative data in Converis

Abstract

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) is one of the largest German research universities. Our Converis-based current research information system (FAU CRIS) contains 6.000+ projects and 70.000+ publication data sets from a wide variety of research areas. Keywords provided by project PIs, funding sources, authors and publishers rarely follow a common ontology, but use non-structured, non-standardized, subject specific terms instead. In order to answer enquiries from the government and other institutions quickly and concisely, these are not always useful. The German National Library (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, DNB) offers a common normative ontology (Integrated Authority File, German: Gemeinsame Normdatei, GND) with more than 2 million hierarchically structured entries. The database is in German, but linked to the Library of Congress and other national libraries. By cross-referencing our available terms with the GND data, we aim to create a complete landscape of our university’s research output. We present the available sources for our data, our current working model for this process along with future considerations to expand and automate this effort.