1: PUBLIC.
- 1.1: Home.
- 1.2: News.
- 1.3: About euroCRIS.
  - 1.3.1: Organisation.
  - 1.3.2: Charter.
  - 1.3.3: Brochure.
  - 1.3.4: Partners.
- 1.4: Events.
  - 1.4.1: Conferences.
    - 1.4.1.1: CRIS 2008.
  - 1.4.2: Seminars.
  - 1.4.3: Membership meetings.
  - 1.4.4: Courses.
- 1.5: Join euroCRIS.
- 1.6: Contact us.
- 1.7: Disclaimer and Terms of use.
2: CERIF.
- 2.1: Introduction.
- 2.2: Tutorial.
- 2.3: CERIF Releases.
  - 2.3.1: CERIF 2004.
  - 2.3.2: CERIF 2006.
  - 2.3.3: CERIF 2008.
3: MEMBERS.
- 3.1: Members area.

Organising courses for you

CERIF for beginners
Advanced CERIF
CRIS course

Tailor-made adaptations are possible in consultation with the applicant.

Peer-To-Peer Training
The timely exploitation of scientific and innovation information is a prerequisite for the success of a Higher Education Institute. We must all be positioned to leverage the vast quantity of research information generated by our scientific endeavours and management offices for the good of the university and ultimately for the benefit of society. At the core of our science systems is the need for robust research information systems.

At the university level, there is a need for systems to meet the diverse needs of researchers, administrators, strategists, and policy-makers. CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) exist to collect and disseminate such research information. This information includes People (researchers and inventors), Projects, Organizations (funding agencies, universities, hospitals), Results (publications, patents and products), Facilities (libraries, laboratories), and Equipment. CRIS therefore have the potential to provide the information resource from which the needs of a university can be met.

Within the euroCRIS community, experts on national CRISs have worked together since 1991 to produce a technological infrastructure to provide convenient integrated access to national RTD information. Cornerstone has been the development and maintenance of CERIF (Common European Research Information Format).

The technology era we live in mandates that we extend the current technologies with emerging Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). This includes homogeneous access to heterogeneous distributed databases with domain ontologies, for expert assistance in query and answer elucidation, and for schema reconciliation and multilingual capabilities.

CERIF is a European Union Recommendation to Member States for the purposes of exchange of R & D Information. It is therefore important for all RTDI (research, technology, development, innovation) actors to appreciate what CERIF is and, more importantly, what it does and can do in the future. CERIF provides a canonical reference data model at both data and metadata levels. As such it is a model for the development of new and a template both for data exchange between CRISs and for mediating access to multiple heterogeneous distributed CRISs. This is a formal data model and thus unambiguously implementable. It takes into account appropriate recent technological developments such as 'the semantic web' and the 'web of trust' as well as advanced database to ensure the optimal representativity (of the real-world domain of interest) and maximum expressivity (of what the user requires). A steadily increasing number of research databases and repositories is CERIF-compliant.

The CERIF Task Group of euroCRIS (http://www.eurocris.org) is working actively on implementations, lessons learned and improvements.

This series of courses will address

CRISs and their use for R & D management and administration and the development of CERIF to meet the requirement;

The kinds of questions a researcher, manager, or decision-maker might ask of a CRIS and how CERIF as a data model is able to provide answers;

CERIF Data model 'nutshell' and introduction to concepts such as metadata, enumerated lists, thesauri, domain ontologies, and other issues;

Some examples of CERIF CRISs in practice and current work on extensions to handle, for example, research output metrics and grey literature.

The practicalities and intricacies of implementing a CERIF-based CRIS

If you are...

A research office director
A research office IT director
A research office information specialist
A research manager or administrator A database programmer / DBA

You will...

See how to get the most out of your information; find out how to know what it is your organization knows.

Learn about CERIF and other technologies; design your information architecture intelligently.
Detect what it is other research managers already know.
Learn first-hand how to implement a CERIF-based research information system.