CASRAI
Consortia 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.org
Thank-you