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Services use cases

Ruđer Bošković Institute

Developing a national interoperable project catalogue in Croatia

Ruđer Bošković Institute’s Centre for Scientific Information (RBI-CSI) has developed and maintains several web services used by researchers and academic community at the national level in Croatia. Each of these services has been using a common lists of researcher identifiers, institution identifiers and projects identifiers for projects financed by the main national funders, the Ministry of Science and Education (MSE) and Croatian Science Foundation (CSF). Those identifiers were used for managing the relationship between publications, researchers, institutions and projects.

For more than twenty years Croatian Scientific Bibliography (CROSBI) has been used as an analytical platform by MSE, in the role of research funder, making it possible to evaluate research outputs through the means of various reports based on the volume and estimated quality of publications emerged from funded project activities.

Along with the CSF establishment as well as with the rise of international collaboration and activities in projects funded by European Commission (FP6, FP7, H2020, etc.) existing catalogue of projects wasn’t sufficient anymore and it had to be upgraded.

In 2016 the projects database (PDB) was created from scratch for handling different types of projects and the API interface was added to simplify information exchange between remote web services. Projects information was accessible in a few formats: EPrints specific, CROSBI specific and standard CSV format.

After this upgrade one important step forward was done – PDB started to exchange records with the OpenAIRE infrastructure and two-way communication was established. OpenAIRE Monitor includes information about the projects funded by MSE and CSF and PDB is harvesting the data collected and curated by the OpenAIRE platform. After this upgrade PDB API is being used by many Croatian web platforms such as HRČAK (Croatian Open Access Journal Platform), DABAR (national repository platform) and some institutional repositories as well.

Demands for a richer metadata description in 2017 had led to the development of the administrative web interface and a frontend for browsing and searching of stored projects information. Main driver and motivation for further development was cooperation with the Agency for Science and Higher Education (ASHE). After previous successful connection between CROSBI and their information system for research outputs assessment and evaluation MOZVAG the time has come to establish interoperability with PDB too. Several modifications were implemented in the backend and data models were mapped thus enabling two systems to exchange projects metadata.

Project description has been added a number of new elements and in the current version of PDB it consists of the:

  • General data about the project: title, acronym, short description, project identifier (provided by funder), type, category, duration, total amount of financing;
  • Information about participating institutions (Croatian institutions only): national unique identifier, institution role, allocated amount of financing, and
  • Information about staff: person unique identifier, role of the participant, duration.