Kerndatensatz Forschung (KDSF)

The Kerndatensatz Forschung (KDSF) — literally “research core dataset” — is Germany’s national standard for how universities and non-university research institutions define, structure, and report information about their research activity: personnel, projects, publications, funding, and infrastructure. It functions as the German science system’s counterpart to the CERIF/CRIS interoperability layer covered elsewhere on this site: a shared data model so that a research report produced by one institution means the same thing, structurally, as the equivalent report from another.

An instance of KDSF-conformant reporting is one that draws its categories, definitions, and identifiers from the standard’s Basisdatenmodell (base data model) — rather than from an institution’s own ad hoc spreadsheet or database schema — when responding to a research-information request, whether that request comes from a state science ministry, a funder, or an internal research office.

Origin and governance

The KDSF project was developed by the Institut fur Forschungsinformation und Qualitatssicherung (iFQ) in cooperation with the German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology (Fraunhofer FIT), with funding from Germany’s federal research ministry. The Wissenschaftsrat recommended voluntary adoption of the KDSF across German universities and research institutions in January 2016. Ongoing governance and further development of the standard has since passed to the Kommission fur Forschungsinformationen in Deutschland (KFiD) — the Commission for Research Information in Germany — which institutions can consult directly on questions about the standard and its application to research reporting.

Structure

The KDSF specification (current stable release: version 1.3) is organized into three parts:

• Basisdatenmodell (base data model) — the full reference documentation of data objects (e.g. research project, publication, person, organisational unit, infrastructure) with their properties, definitions, and classifications.
• Module — selective subsets of the base model scoped to a specific reporting purpose, such as publications reporting or personnel reporting, so an institution doesn’t have to implement the entire base model to answer one kind of question.
• Referenzabfragen (reference queries) — standardised proposals for how a specific information request (for example, how many third-party-funded projects an institution ran in a given year) should be answered using the base model’s data objects.

A research-field classification (KDSF-FFK) was added to the standard in 2020 and folded into the specification, giving institutions a controlled vocabulary for classifying research activity by field alongside the base model’s other categories.

Identifiers used

The KDSF specifies identifier usage for several of its core entities: ORCID for identifying individual researchers, DOI for publications and other citable outputs, and a combination of Fundref, GERiT (the German Register of Institutions), and ROR for identifying funding bodies and research organisations, domestically and internationally. This identifier layer is what lets KDSF-structured reports interoperate with international research-information infrastructure rather than remaining a closed, Germany-only reporting format.

Worked examples

• State-ministry reporting. A German university’s research office receives a periodic research-performance request from its state (Land) science ministry. Instead of manually compiling figures from department spreadsheets, the office exports the relevant fields directly from its CRIS — projects, third-party funding, publications with DOIs, personnel with ORCID iDs — mapped to KDSF’s base-data-model categories, and answers the ministry’s request using one of the standard’s reference queries.
• CRIS configuration. When a research institution configures or procures a CRIS platform (for example Pure, VIVO, or a comparable system), it maps the platform’s internal data objects to KDSF’s “Forschungsprojekt” (research project) and “Publikation” (publication) categories during implementation, so the resulting system can generate KDSF-conformant exports without a separate manual reporting step later.

Counter-example

An institution’s internal, purpose-built tracking spreadsheet for a single grant programme — even if accurate and well-maintained — is not itself a KDSF instance: it doesn’t use the standard’s defined data objects, doesn’t carry the specified identifiers (ORCID, DOI, ROR/GERiT), and can’t answer a Referenzabfrage without being manually re-mapped first. Likewise, a funding proposal submitted through a funder’s own application portal is a funding-application process, not a KDSF report — the two operate on different data models for different purposes, even though both ultimately describe overlapping research activity.

How KDSF relates to other CASRAI-covered standards

KDSF is a national reporting standard, not a piece of software: a CRIS is the system an institution runs, and CERIF (maintained by euroCRIS) is a separate, general-purpose European data-exchange model that a CRIS can use for interoperability. KDSF instead defines what German institutions specifically need to report and how, drawing on the same identifier ecosystem (ORCID, DOI, ROR) that underpins CERIF-based exchange and CASRAI’s broader persistent identifiers and research information systems coverage. It sits alongside Germany’s other national research-information efforts, including NFDI (which addresses research data infrastructure rather than research-activity reporting), and funding bodies such as the DFG and the federal research ministry whose funding helped establish the KDSF project.

References

• KFiD, “KDSF-Standard” (kerndatensatz-forschung.de)
• KFiD, “Standards” (kfid-online.de/standards.php)
• “The Research Core Dataset for the German science system: developing standards for an integrated management of research information,” Scientometrics (Springer, 2016) (link.springer.com)
• German Council of Science and Humanities (Wissenschaftsrat), recommendation on the introduction of the KDSF (January 2016)