Dictionary domainTrack B
Research-information systems and integration
CRIS, RIM, CERIF, OpenAIRE, JATS — vendor-neutral terms.
For implementers
Operational deployment checklist for Research-information systems and integration: prerequisites, five deploy steps, integration notes for Pure, Symplectic Elements, Worktribe, DSpace, and more, plus the pitfalls that recur in the field.
Terms in this domain
34 terms
EOSC Federation
The architectural model adopted by EOSC for federating heterogeneous national, thematic, and pan-European research-data infrastructures into a single user-facing layer, with shared identity and access management, monitoring, accounting, helpdesk, and service onboarding.
EOSC Marketplace
The catalogue of FAIR research services accessible to European researchers through the European Open Science Cloud, where service providers register their offerings and researchers can discover, order, and (where applicable) access services with EOSC-federated authentication.
Crossref deposit XML
The XML schema family maintained by Crossref that publishers and content-registration members use to submit metadata when minting Crossref DOIs, with distinct sub-schemas for journals, books, conference proceedings, preprints, peer reviews, grants, and standards.
DataCite metadata schema
The XML/JSON schema (current version 4.x) maintained by the DataCite Metadata Working Group that defines the mandatory, recommended, and optional metadata properties to be supplied when registering a DOI through DataCite.
RIOXX
Research Outputs Information Exchange XML (RIOXX): a UK-originated application profile for institutional-repository metadata, layered on Dublin Core, designed to capture funder, project, and licence information for OA-compliance reporting, currently maintained at v3.0.
MODS
Metadata Object Description Schema: a Library of Congress XML schema for descriptive bibliographic metadata, designed as a richer alternative to Dublin Core and a more flexible alternative to MARC for library, archive, and repository contexts.
METS
Metadata Encoding and Transmission Standard: a Library of Congress-maintained XML schema for encoding descriptive, administrative, and structural metadata for digital library objects, providing a wrapper around content files and metadata sections.
RDF triple store
A database management system specialised for storing and querying RDF (Resource Description Framework) statements — subject-predicate-object triples (or named-graph quads) — typically with a SPARQL query engine on top.
SPARQL endpoint
An HTTP endpoint that accepts SPARQL queries (the W3C-standard query language for RDF) against an RDF dataset and returns results in standard formats (XML, JSON, CSV, TSV), implementing the SPARQL 1.1 Protocol.
Linked Data Fragments
A family of Web interfaces for publishing RDF data — ranging from data dumps through SPARQL endpoints to lightweight Triple Pattern Fragments — designed to allow clients to query large RDF datasets without overloading the server.
ResourceSync
ANSI/NISO Z39.99: a framework for synchronising resources between a source server and one or more destination servers using Web-based sitemaps with extensions for change lists, incremental updates, and push notifications.
OAI-ORE
Open Archives Initiative Object Reuse and Exchange: a set of specifications, complementary to OAI-PMH, that define how to describe and exchange aggregations of Web resources (a 'compound digital object') using standard Web Architecture and Linked Data principles.
JATS XML
Journal Article Tag Suite (ANSI/NISO Z39.96): an XML vocabulary for describing the textual content and metadata of scholarly journal articles, comprising tag sets for archival (Green), publishing (Blue), and authoring (Pumpkin) use cases.
OAI-PMH
Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting: a low-barrier HTTP/XML protocol that allows a 'data provider' system (typically a repository or CRIS) to expose its metadata records for incremental harvesting by 'service providers' (aggregators, search services, national portals).
CRIS interoperability
The capacity of CRIS systems to exchange data with each other and with adjacent systems (repositories, funders, publishers, aggregators) through shared data models, schemas, protocols, and persistent identifiers — most prominently CERIF, OAI-PMH, OpenAIRE Guidelines, and PID-based joins.
Affiliation (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, a time-bounded relationship between a Person record and an Organization Unit, capturing the role (employee, visitor, honorary, student), start and end dates, employment fraction, and other contextual attributes of the association.
Organization unit
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a structural component of a research organisation — a faculty, school, department, institute, centre, lab, or research group — with its own identifier, name, parent and child relationships, type, start and end dates, and links to People, Projects, and Outputs.
Person record (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, the entity representing an individual person involved in research — researcher, RA, PhD candidate, or other contributor — with metadata including names (preferred and historical), identifiers (ORCID iD, ISNI, local HR ID), employments, qualifications, and links to outputs, projects, and organisational units.
Project (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a discrete research project with a defined scope, time period, participating people and organisations, funding source(s), and intended or actual outputs — typically the central organising entity for activity-level reporting.
Funding entity
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a specific award or funding instance — its funder, award number, amount, currency, start and end dates, and the project and people it supports — distinct from the abstract Funder organisation and from the project itself.
Research output (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a discrete product of research — a publication, dataset, software release, patent, performance, exhibition, or other recognised output — recorded with its own identifier, type, date, contributors, and relationships to people, organisations, and projects.
Research activity (CRIS)
In CRIS terminology, an entity representing a research undertaking — typically a project, programme, or organised research effort — with its own start and end dates, participants, funding sources, outputs, and host organisation, around which CRIS data accretes over the activity's lifetime.
Research entity (CRIS)
A first-class object in a CRIS data model — typically Person, Project, Publication, Organisation Unit, Funding, Equipment, or Activity — that has its own identifier, metadata schema, and relationships to other entities, and that can be managed and reported on independently.
EOSC
European Open Science Cloud: an EU-led initiative and emerging federation of research data infrastructures intended to provide European researchers with seamless, cross-border, cross-discipline access to data, services, and computational resources under FAIR and open-science principles.
OpenAIRE Nexus
An OpenAIRE-led Horizon-Europe-funded initiative (2021-2024) that bundles OpenAIRE services and tools into a coherent service portfolio for delivery through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), targeting researchers, content providers, research communities, funders, and policy makers.
OpenAIRE EXPLORE
The end-user-facing discovery service of OpenAIRE that allows researchers, funders, and the public to search and browse the OpenAIRE Graph by publications, datasets, software, projects, organisations, and funders.
OpenAIRE Graph
An open scholarly knowledge graph maintained by OpenAIRE that aggregates and links publications, datasets, software, projects, organisations, and people harvested from thousands of repositories, journals, and CRIS systems across Europe and globally, with deduplication, enrichment, and link inference applied.
DSpace-CRIS
An open-source extension of the DSpace repository platform, developed by 4Science and the DSpace community, that adds CRIS-style entity management for researchers, projects, organisational units, journals, and other research-information entities alongside the existing repository content.
VIVO
An open-source semantic-web application and ontology developed by the VIVO community (initially at Cornell University, now under DuraSpace/LYRASIS) that publishes information about researchers, departments, publications, grants, and courses as linked open data and as a navigable web interface.
Elements (Symplectic)
A commercial CRIS product developed by Symplectic (part of Digital Science) that automates the discovery, capture, and management of research outputs and activities for individual researchers and institutional reporting workflows, with strong emphasis on researcher-facing workflows.
Pure
A commercial CRIS product, originally developed by Atira A/S in Denmark and now owned by Elsevier, used by universities and research organisations to manage publications, projects, people, organisational units, awards, equipment, and external engagement, and to expose this information through a configurable public 'research portal'.
CERIF
Common European Research Information Format: an EU-recommended data model and exchange schema for research information, developed and maintained by euroCRIS, that defines core entities (Person, Project, Publication, OrgUnit, Funding, Equipment) and the relationships among them with explicit role-and-time semantics.
RIM
Research Information Management: the organisational practice and the supporting systems and processes by which a university or research organisation collects, manages, and uses information about its research activities, encompassing both the technical CRIS layer and the people and policies around it.
CRIS
Current Research Information System: an enterprise-class software system that aggregates, stores, and publishes information about a research organisation's activities — its researchers, publications, projects, funding, equipment, collaborations, and outputs — and exposes that information to internal management and external reporting consumers.
