About the Dictionary
What the CASRAI Dictionary is, and why it exists
A controlled vocabulary for research administration — designed so funders, institutions, publishers, and researchers exchange information without re-deriving definitions every time.
What this is
The CASRAI Dictionary is a structured, citable, openly licensed reference vocabulary for everything researchers are routinely asked about — funding, contributions, persistent identifiers, data management, compliance, integrity, assessment, sustainability, and the full set of research outputs.
Each entry is an operational definition: not just what a word means, but how to decide whether a thing is an instance of it. Entries carry worked examples, counter-examples, relationships to other terms, version stamps, stewardship attribution, and Schema.org DefinedTerm markup ready for downstream systems.
Why it exists
The administrative burden on researchers is enormous, and most of it comes from the same questions being asked in slightly different formats by funders, institutions, publishers, and reporting bodies. Shared vocabulary is the cheapest way to reduce that burden: define a thing once, define it precisely, and let everyone reuse the definition.
That was CASRAI's original mission from 2006, and it remains the mission of the current revival: provide the shared terms that the research-information ecosystem reuses rather than re-deriving them.
How it's structured
- Dictionary terms — the primary entries (target: ~520 across all 20 domains by v2027.2; 48 live in v2026.1)
- Object templates — structured types like Award, Conference Paper, Dataset (123 in v2026.1)
- Picklists — controlled enumerated values like Contributor Roles, Output Types (10 in v2026.1)
- Domains — 20 thematic clusters organised across 5 tracks (Contribution & attribution; Identifiers & infrastructure; Data, methods, reproducibility; Compliance, integrity, security; Assessment, equity, sustainability, lifecycle)
Who maintains it
An editorial board sets policy and ratifies releases. Twenty working groups— one per domain — propose, draft, and review entries. Community proposals enter via the contribute flowand are credited (using CRediT itself) when accepted.
How it relates to other vocabularies
The dictionary is integrative, not exhaustive. Several adjacent standards have their own stewards, and the dictionary federates with them rather than re-publishing their content:
- CRediT (the 14 contributor roles) is stewarded by NISO as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022. The dictionary mirrors with
sameAspointers; the canonical definitions live at casrai.org/credit. - The Catalogue of Elements (CASRAI's deep semantic inventory) is stewarded by euroCRIS as an enrichment to CERIF.
- The Research Data Management Terminology is stewarded by CODATA.
The dictionary is the integrative reference and the incubator for net-new vocabulary across the 20 domains. Some of what we develop will graduate into formal NISO / RDA / euroCRIS / CODATA standards in time.
Versioning policy
- Twice-yearly stable releases (target: March and September). Format:
vYYYY.N. - Stable entries are frozen until the next release. Drafts (status: under-review, proposed) are visible but flagged.
- Identifiers are immutable. Deprecated entries remain resolving and point to successors via
replaced-byrelationships. - Prior versions accessible at
/dictionary/term/<slug>?v=2026.1(versioning controls coming in v2026.2).
Licensing
All dictionary content is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0). You may reuse, adapt, translate, and embed it — including in commercial systems — with attribution to CASRAI. See our licensing page for the recommended attribution string and exceptions.
Cite the dictionary
The recommended scholarly citation form is on the citation policy page. A quick citation widget:
