Common European Research Information Format

1. Definition

The Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) is a formal conceptual model to support the management of Research Information, including the setup of and the interoperation between Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). The CERIF model is considered a standard, as it is recommended by the European Union to its Member States.

2. Objectives

• Recording of the relevant research information but also standard for automated interchange;

• Co-operation with the repository and library communities, the research management community, the innovation community and others;

• With small efforts, big benefits for the researcher (automated CV, bibliography, project participation list, institutional web page generation, part-completion of research proposals etc.).

3. Owner

CERIF was developed with the help of the European Commission, and is now managed by euroCRIS. Areas of interest of euroCRIS not only cover research databases and maintenance of CERIF, but explicitly also CRIS (Current Research Information System) related data like scientific datasets, (open access) institutional repositories, as well as data access and exchange mechanisms, standards and guidelines and best practice for CRIS.

4. Intended audience

The information provided by CERIF could be used by:

• researchers (to find partners, to track competitors, to form collaborations);
• research managers (to assess performance and research outputs and to find reviewers for research proposals);
• research strategists (to decide on priorities and resourcing compared with other countries);
• publication editors (to find reviewers and potential authors);
• intermediaries / brokers (to find research products and ideas that can be carried forward with knowledge/ technology transfer to wealth creation);
• the media (to communicate the results of R&D in a socio-economic context); and
• the general public (for interest).

5. Long description

Research is international. Indeed, a research project in country A is likely to be based on previous research in several other countries. Many research projects are now transnational: well-known examples include the human genome and climate change but there are many others, especially where expensive infrastructure is utilised such as particle physics or space science. Furthermore, knowledge of the research activity in country A may influence the strategy towards research - including priorities and resources provided - in country B. Thus there is a need to share research information across countries, or even between different funding agencies in the same country.

CERIF was created for that purpose: interoperability of the management of Research Information. The essential features of CERIF are:

(a) it has the concept of objects or entities with attributes such as project, person, organisational unit;

(b) it supports n:m relationships between them (and recursively on any of them) using 'linking relations' thus providing rich semantics including roles and time;

(c) it is fully internationalised in language and character set;

(d) it is extensible without prejudicing the core data model thus providing guaranteed interoperability at least at the core level but not precluding even richer intercommunication. It is designed for use both for data exchange (data file transfer) and for heterogeneous distributed query / result environments. The model includes in particular a so-called Semantic Layer, that makes the model flexible and scalable for application in very heterogeneous environments.

A researcher, provided with a CERIF-CRIS, could obtain a large benefit (automated CV, bibliography, project participation list, institutional web page generation, part-completion of research proposals etc.) for a relatively small input effort since most input is automated or only required once and used many times. Similarly a research manager gains an overview of research activity within and outside their institution leading to better strategic decision-making.

In a nutshell, CERIF provides interoperation of CRIS and associated systems with formal syntax and declared semantics so that it is reliable and scalable. The ideal end situation is a complete, integrated end-to-end ICT support for the R&D process chain – work programme, proposal, project, results, exploitation, wealth creation – across heterogeneous distributed CRISs.

Current version as of 2014 of CERIF is made of several components:

• CERIF – 1.5 FDM: Model Introduction and Specification
• CERIF – 1.5 FDM: SQL scripts for most common databases
• CERIF – 1.5 XML: Data Exchange Format Specification 
• CERIF – 1.5 XML Examples 
• CERIF – 1.5 XML Schema Files
• CERIF – 1.5 Semantics: Insight into the CERIF Semantic Layer and Vocabularies
• CERIF – 1.5 Vocabulary

6. How to participate

It is possible to join euroCRIS as a member in order to participate on further developments of CERIF: http://www.eurocris.org/Index.php?page=joinEurCRIS&t=1

7. History / Key milestones

The early pre-1985 CRIS described projects (usually text only and monolingual) and were structured using an ordered set of (repeatable) fields. They were based on the library catalogue card idea (i.e. metadata). Gradually the need for a standard format for interchange of R&D information was seen. The European Commission put together a group of experts nominated by national governments with the purpose to define a Common European Research Information Format (CERIF).

The first version of CERIF – produced in 1991 – had a single-entry focus and a simple record format: the project was an entity with persons, organisations and other information represented as attributes. Over the years CERIF has gone through various development stages, taking into account the requirements regarding content & structure, flexibility of relationships, semantic consistency and better data quality in general, as well as user requirements.

Current version as of 2014 is CERIF 1.5, CERIF 1.6 is for testing purposes only, and a priority agenda has been agreed towards next steps and towards CERIF 2.0, in the following order (highest priority first): Model Cleaning, Research Data, Impact context, Geolocation, Subject Classifications, Vocabularies (facility, equipment, service), Mappings to most applied Repository Formats, Restrictive Metadata.

8. Additional documents

• CERIF – 1.5 XML: Data Exchange Format Specification: http://www.eurocris.org/Uploads/Web%20pages/CERIF-1.5/CERIF1.5_XML.pdf