SIGMA CRIS, an implementation of VIVO

Abstract

The growing complexity of the digital research environments has highlighted the importance of having powerful tools for searching and discovering research information. The advance of Open Science, that includes not only Open Access, but also Open Data and the need to make the data FAIR, has shown that it's necessary to evolve the way we search and visualize the research results. So, when the scientific information is correctly stored in the CRIS, it must also be easy to search and find, and must guide the discovery of the information. This is one of the objectives within SIGMA's Strategic Plan for the Research area. Since the beginning of 2018, SIGMA is working to improve the search tools for scientific production, whose first results we will present here.

This project began by evaluating the best ontology to translate the current data model for SIGMA CRIS, to a semantic model. To do this, we studied some of the semantic engines that exist and finally decided to test the VIVO solution. We found that VIVO ontology fits more than 80% with the Spanish model for Research and took into account that VIVO is an Open Source Software supported by members and an ontology to represent the scholarship that is used by relevant universities, highly positioned in the international rankings and, finally, we also value the large community of members behind VIVO and Duraspace. For these reasons, SIGMA decided to join the DuraSpace community, participating in the governance of the VIVO project. With this experience, we have now an adapted SIGMA ontology based on the VIVO ontology and a Semantic Expert Guide, working on SIGMA CRIS. With our involvement in the governance of the VIVO project, we have participated in the definition of the VIVO product direction for 2019, among other tasks.