JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 19(12): 1854-1867, doi: 10.3217/jucs-019-12-1854
Promoting International Interoperability of Research Information Systems: VIVO and CERIF
expand article infoLeonardo Lezcano, Brigitte Jörg§, Brian Lowe|, Jon Corson-Rikert|
‡ University of Alcalá, Madrid, Spain§ University of Bath, Bath, United Kingdom| Cornell University, New York, United States of America
Open Access
Abstract
Institutional repositories (IR) and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) store and manage information on the context in which research activity takes place. Several models, standards and ontologies have been proposed to date as solutions to provide coherent semantic descriptions of research information. These present a large degree of overlap but also present very different approaches to modelling. This paper introduces a contrast of two of the more widespread models, the VIVO ontology and the CERIF standards, and provides guidance for mapping them in a way that enables clients to integrate data coming from heterogeneous sources. The majority of mapping challenges have risen from the representation of VIVO sub-hierarchies in CERIF as well as from the representation of CERIF attributes in VIVO. In addition, the paper illustrates features for linking data across the Web, for querying of geographically distributed data stores and for aggregating data described using different data models in a common store. These features are supported by semantic web technologies including RDF, OWL and SWRL.
Keywords
CERIF, VIVO, CRIS, research information, scientific information, ontologies, knowledge representation, mapping, semantic interoperability, linked data, OWL, SPARQL