OMEGA-PSIR – A solution for implementing university research knowledge base

Abstract

In 2010 a nation-wide strategic program SYNAT, aiming at building a scientific information infrastructure in Poland, has been launched. Originally, the program has been scheduled for the period of three years, in due of the program implementation it was extended till the mid of 2014. It was financed by the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR) in Poland. A network of 16 academic and scientific partners has committed to implement the SYNAT’s objectives in the form of a universal open knowledge infrastructure for the information society in Poland.

The scale of the SYNAT program was unprecedented for the Higher Education Sector in Poland. Beyond the system development, a comprehensive portfolio of research problems has been addressed by the partners (Bembenik et al. 2013; Bembenik et al. 2014). In the view of the limited implementation time, the primary goal of the program consisted in meeting the challenges of global digital information revolution, especially in the context of scientific information.

One of the outcomes of SYNAT is the software OMEGA-PSIR (in the sequel Ω-R), designed and implemented by a team of Warsaw University of Technology. We present the software – a cutting edge solution for building a research knowledge base of academic institutions. We present functionality of the system, as well as, sketch some applied AI technologies aiming at providing features attractive for the system beneficiaries. It is shown that although a classical repository is the main part of the system, the essential value of the solution is in providing analytical tools, especially useful for the “research management”, but also for the researchers, students, and the university administration. Lessons learned from deploying the software at Warsaw University of Technology and other Polish universities are also discussed.