Promoting international interoperability of research information systems: VIVO and CERIF

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 subhierarchies 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.