Research Information Standards Adoption: Development of a Visual Insight Tool at the University of Cambridge

Abstract

While Research Information continues to mature as an area of expertise, discussions regarding the implementation and adoption of standardisation initiatives, such as CASRAI and CERIF, have intensified. Possessing the capacity to use a standard does not obligate its adoption, so the extent to which standards are employed varies across use cases and institutions, in a way that is difficult to qualify and determine. We are presenting a light-weight visualisation framework for presenting, comparing and improving the adoption of research information standards for research institutions. The framework is implemented for providing insight into identifier adoption at the University of Cambridge. The tool is easy to deploy and implement, and the insights it generates are intended to express clearly the extent to which Research Information standards have been adopted. Furthermore, the framework can be used to make this adoption knowledge available as linked open data held at a local level, reducing the need for costly metastudies and helping the standardisation community to monitor and focus standardisation development.