Advancing Research Administration Standards to Enhance Data Quality and Availability
CASRAI, led by Executive Director David Baker, aims to address key issues in research administration including wasted researcher time, data duplicity, and data silos. By establishing a common framework for data semantics and structure, CASRAI advocates for software and database alignment that supports conformant data consumption. This initiative promotes a unified file management approach for research teams, facilitating efficient reporting and enhanced data quality across various research sectors, including health sciences and humanities.
Advancing Research Administration Standards to Enhance Data Quality and Availability
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Presentation Transcript
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
