CASRAIConsortia Advancing Standards in

Research Administration Information

David Baker, Executive Director

The players

• Research Teams (largely the data owners)

• Research Institutions

• Research Funders

The problems

• Researcher time wasted

• Unnecessary duplication

• Data quality

• Data availability

• Data silos

The solution

• Leading players agree on semantics and structure of data and publish specifications

• Software and databases align to produce and consume data that is conformant to these specifications

• Research teams maintain a single file on themselves and their activities and generate any reports from that file on demand

Communities• Health Sciences

• Natural Sciences

• Engineering

• Humanities

• Social Sciences

• Arts and Literature

Focus• Document-centric (familiar concept for

business stakeholders)

• Write once, reuse anywhere

• Person to org exchange centric but also facilitates org to org

• Business-first focus

• Implementation agnostic

Conceptual Structures

• Profiles

• Documents

• Packages

Profiles• Complete history of an entity

• Includes current state (which will become history)

• Sections, Record-types, Fields, Lists

• Technical labels, humans labels, semantic definitions, data structures, rules

Documents

• Template definition for a subset of a profile at a point in time

• Meets the info needs of one step in a process

• Can be validated separately

Packages

• Collections of documents

• Culled from multiple, independently managed profiles

Personnel Data

• Describes people conducting research

• Can generate: Academic CV, Funding CV, Community CV, Student CV, Faculty Annual Reports.

• Includes: Contact, Education History, Employment History, Funding History, Contributions (services and outputs)

Activity Data• Describe the research projects and

programs conducted.

• Can generate: Funding Applications, Compliance Reports, Financial and Progress Reports, Impact Reports.

• Includes: Participants, Partners, Funding Received, Training of Highly Qualified Personnel (HQP), Impacts.

Impact Data

• Captures the direct and derived impacts of research activity on new outputs and outcomes and upon society

• Inserts simple indicator elements into the Personnel and Activity data profiles

• Distills all impact indicators down to common data sources (less duplication)

Classification Taxonomy

• An integrated taxonomy for classifying researchers and activities

• Includes disciplines, subjects, and fields of application

CASRAI Outputs• Conceptual data dictionary (business

users)

• XML data dictionary (technical users)

• Lists update services

• Version control

• Test Suites

dbaker@casrai.orgThank-you