Federation partner
ARDC
The Australian Research Data Commons stewards RAiD, the Research Activity Identifier — a persistent identifier for projects and research activities, formalised as ISO 23527:2022.
What ARDC stewards
The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) is the national research-data infrastructure organisation for Australia. It runs services across the research-data lifecycle — repositories, identifiers, training, and platform tooling — and partners with international standards bodies and identifier registries.
Of direct relevance to CASRAI vocabularies, ARDC is the stewarding organisation for RAiD — the Research Activity Identifier. RAiD is a persistent identifier for a research project or activity: the unit of work that sits between a funded grant on one side and a published output on the other, and that has historically lacked a stable identifier of its own.
RAiD and ISO 23527:2022
RAiD was formalised as ISO 23527:2022 — Information and documentation — Research Activity Identifier (RAiD). ISO publication moved RAiD from being a regional Australian initiative to being an internationally recognised standard with a registration authority and a defined metadata schema.
The identifier itself is structured to be globally unique and persistent, with a metadata record that captures the project's start and end dates, funder, contributors, related outputs, and access conditions. Crucially the schema is designed to reference other identifiers — ORCID iDs for people, ROR iDs for organisations, Crossref Funder IDs for funders, and DOIs for related outputs — rather than embedding them as free text.
Why RAiD matters for CASRAI vocabularies
The CASRAI Catalogue includes many elements that describe research projects: titles, abstracts, dates, funding sources, participants, outputs, deliverables. Until RAiD existed, those elements had no canonical identifier to attach to: a "project" was identified by a string of free text, a funder reference number, or a local CRIS record ID, none of which travelled cleanly across institutions.
RAiD provides the missing anchor. A project described once in the CASRAI Catalogue can now carry a RAiD that resolves wherever the project is mentioned — in a funder report, in a CRIS, in a deposit on a related publication, in a CV. The cross-walk between Catalogue project-level elements and the RAiD metadata schema is recorded on the cross-walks reference page.
How CASRAI federates with ARDC
- Project-level Catalogue elements reference RAiD where one exists.
- Examples in the CASRAI implementation guide show RAiD usage alongside ORCID, ROR, and DOI.
- Where ARDC publishes updates to the RAiD schema, the corresponding cross-walk entries are revised.
Why ARDC
ARDC's stewardship of RAiD is well-resourced, technically capable, and internationally engaged. The organisation has a track record of running infrastructure rather than just convening committees, which is what an identifier scheme needs — a registry has to stay up. The combination of ARDC operational stewardship and ISO standardisation gives RAiD the kind of institutional weight that CRediT received from NISO and that euroCRIS provides for the Catalogue.
