Catalogue of Elements: 2020 handover
euroCRIS
The European Organization for International Research Information stewards the CASRAI Catalogue of Elements as an enrichment to CERIF, the Common European Research Information Format.
What euroCRIS stewards
euroCRIS holds long-term custody of the CASRAI Catalogue of Elements — the semantically described inventory of data elements used across funding applications, CVs, project management, compliance, research data management, and scholarly communications. The Catalogue moved to euroCRIS when CASRAI wound down in 2020 and was formalised in the joint stewardship statement issued with NISO and CODATA.
The Catalogue is preserved as a public repository at github.com/EuroCRIS/CASRAI-Dictionaries. The repository carries the original element definitions, value lists, and cross-references that the CASRAI working groups produced between 2010 and 2020.
CERIF enrichment
euroCRIS also maintains CERIF, the Common European Research Information Format. CERIF is the conceptual data model that most enterprise current research information systems (CRIS) align with: Pure, Symplectic Elements, VIVO, DSpace-CRIS, Converis, and a long tail of in-house systems. The CASRAI Catalogue and CERIF have a documented alignment that pre-dates the CASRAI wind-down by several years, so the handover continued a working relationship rather than initiating a new one.
In practice the Catalogue is now best understood as a semantic enrichment layer for CERIF-conformant CRIS systems. It is no longer a free-standing dictionary aimed at end-user researchers; it is a developer-oriented vocabulary aimed at CRIS implementers, integration engineers, and the standards staff at research-performing organisations.
How CASRAI's dictionary points to euroCRIS's Catalogue
- The Catalogue's canonical home is the euroCRIS repository, not this site. We point at it rather than mirror it.
- Where the Catalogue references CRediT roles, the cross-walk aligns with NISO's canonical CRediT role identifiers (see NISO federation) so the same identifiers resolve consistently in both places.
- Catalogue–CERIF mappings sit on the cross-walks reference page, which records the entity-by-entity correspondences as they evolve.
Why euroCRIS
euroCRIS was the natural steward for three reasons. First, the existing alignment between the Catalogue and CERIF meant the technical work to bring the two into sustained co-maintenance was already largely complete. Second, the audience for the Catalogue — CRIS implementers, repository managers, and research-information staff at universities and funders — overlaps almost completely with the euroCRIS membership. Third, euroCRIS has the institutional continuity (it has run since 2002) to hold the asset indefinitely without the kind of organisational risk that a smaller successor body would have carried.
Working with the Catalogue
Implementers integrating the Catalogue into a CRIS deployment should start at the GitHub repository and read the per-dictionary README files. The CERIF specification on the euroCRIS site documents the entity model the Catalogue enriches. Where a specific element corresponds to a CRediT role, follow the link through to the NISO CRediT page for the canonical role definition.
