Using CRIS to power research data discovery

In the UK, Jisc is developing a national Research Data Discovery Service (RDDS) in partnership with the Digital Curation Centre and the UK Data Archive. In the first phase of the project (2013–2014), the team set up an experimental service based on the ORCA software developed by ANDS for Research Data Australia. Unlike the Australian version, the UK instance harvested metadata in a variety of formats and performed crosswalks to convert it to the required format. Since the repositories and the metadata standards they used were focused on the datasets themselves, some useful information about researchers, projects and funders was missing.

In the second phase of the project (2014–2016), the team is looking at ways of filling those gaps by harvesting not only from data repositories but also from CRIS instances. We present a metadata crosswalk from CERIF to RIF-CS – the standard used by ORCA – and highlight the issues and challenges raised by using it in the context of the RDDS. We also consider the positive effect that a more complete network of information has on the discoverability of research data.