JISC

Summary 

CERIF has been recommended for adoption across the UK research community in order to streamline the flow of data between stakeholders, improve data quality and reduce costs across the sector by enabling more efficient and effective procedures related to research information data exchange. Several successful JSC- funded projects have spearheaded this adoption process and through working closely with euroCRIS, have led directly to enhancements to the CERIF standard for the UK community. However, although CERIF is a standard model, there is recognition that the community is in danger of diluting the potential power of the standard and the benefits it can bring because of the varying ways in which CERIF has been mapped at the detail level in these separate projects. In order to be truly interoperable and maximise the efficiency savings that have been estimated if the UK adopts CERIF, we need to agree precisely which CERIF entities we use, how we code identifiers and the semantics for the various entities and their roles and relationships to one another.  We also need to demonstrate whether CERIF-XML works in key exchange scenarios and so begins to realize the cost-savings and improved data quality forecast. The Cerif in Action project aims to address these issues.

Objectives 

CERIF in Action builds directly on work from earlier JISC projects [such as Readiness4Ref, CRISPool, CERIFy and IRIOS] to synthesise relevant CERIF mappings and collate best practice to define a standard CERIF-XML schema for use in key data exchange scenarios for the broader JISC community.  The objective is to take this agreed model through to production ready interfaces for two of the main commercial CRIS systems [Pure and Symplectic] and the largest repository platform [ePrints] in the UK to demonstrate the use of CERIF-XML in live scenarios and then share our findings and recommendations with the community via a roadmap for adoption. 

Anticipated Outputs and Outcomes