Source Data for "fields of expertise"
Daniel Gooch
We’re working at the moment on publishing individual sub-sites for each of our “disciplines”, including a list of staff involved in teaching/research in the discipline with links to their profiles.
The immediate challenge is that many of the disciplines we will publish sub-sites for will exist only on the web, i.e. they are not formal disciplines that exist in any of our administrative systems at the moment. While we do have a concept of disciplines in our Finance and HR systems, they are administrative in that they only exist as a cost centre to which salary or other costs will be allocated. They are also hierarchical in nature, in that a discipline is part of a school which in turn is part of a faculty. This hierarchy does not quite meet our vision for disciplines for web publishing purposes which may be cross-school or cross-faculty (e.g. environment law might include staff from 2 schools in 2 different faculties).
At the moment it appears as though we will be creating a new corporate source (i.e. database) for these disciplines, with an interface that will allow discipline coordinators (or delegates) to create relationships between individual staff members (from our HR system) with these disciplines. I don’t like the idea of creating a new database/application for managing this, but at the moment can’t see a good alternative. I remember a discussion at the e-Research conference workshop about a similar topic, and before we embark on any work I thought I’d seek advice from anyone on this group who’d care to offer it.
Simon Porter
Hi Daniel,
I believe UQ created the interface (along with associated workflows) for managing programs of research in the UQ reSEARCHers development. This appears to be a similar approach to Cornell University’s VIVO solution.
When I was part of the Research management rollout, we had plans on the table to include the management of research programs within our research management system. (didn’t quite get there though. Hopefully this will be revisited post rqf)
I think these are basically the two options.
The problem is that if you create research programs/ disciplines in another corporate system outside of your already established research reporting solutions, then whatever system that is basically has to take a copy of all the data that a research program has a relationship with: ie people, org units, grants, publications, student supervisions, teaching units (depending on how far you want to go.) given the amount of work in actually massaging this data together, it makes sense that this system should also be the one that generates the presentation layer. In the longer run, this approach should also give you the opportunity to incorporate other data sources from outside the university reporting world such as associate news articles, relevant library resource collections, research tools ect. (this is the VIVO model)
Depending on your timelines, something you might want to take account of is UQ’s Researcher Portfolio project. http://pilot.apsr.edu.au/wiki/index.php/Researcher
The objectives of the project are (from the wiki page):
To develop and demonstrate workflows which will enable the linking of institutional information sources, such as publication repositories and research management solutions, to deliver a "portfolio" view of the research activities and interests of staff at partner institutions. To develop and demonstrate workflows for the ingest and use of publication and grants data from the ResearchMaster(RM) system as part of a proof of concept solution.
The University of Queensland work, builds on their Fez+Fedora implementation work and is intended to also be applicable to DSpace. In either case, I would follow up with UQ to see how much of their work you can ‘piggy back’ on. (someone from UQ might want to comment on this J )
Something else that may be useful. For the planning of VIVO, Cornell University made use of the The AKT Reference Ontology for describing research portals. http://kmi.open.ac.uk/projects/akt/ref-onto/ .
Hope this helps,
Simon
Simon Porter
Information Manager (Research) eScholarship Research Centre
email: sjpo...@unimelb.edu.au
ph: +613 8344 3628
mob: 0419 877 468