Overview

PTCRISync Overview

PTCRIS (Portuguese Current Research Information System) is a program, officially initiated in May 2014, which aims to ensure the creation and sustained development of a national integrated information ecosystem, to support research management according to the best international standards and practices. One of PTCRIS' goals is to reduce the burden of research output management, by adopting an "input once, re-use often" principle.

PTCRISync is a synchronization framework developed in this context, that relies on ORCID - a community-based service that aims to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers (an ORCID iD) and a method of linking research outputs to these identifiers, based on data collected from external sources - as a central hub for information exchange between the various national systems (including CV management systems such as DeGóis, open access repositories such as RCAAP or SARI, and local CRIS systems) and international systems (WoK, Scopus, Datacite, etc), that shall enable researchers (or managers) to register once a given research output at one of the interconnected national systems, and automatically propagate that output to the remaining ones, thus ensuring global consistency of the stored information.

The main challenge in the design of this framework stems from fundamental differences between the data model of ORCID and that of most CRIS services. The specified synchronization framework operates at the user profile level, that is, it synchronizes user profiles from different CRIS services with the corresponding user profile from ORCID. The effective synchronization procedures are designed to keep the user profiles at ORCID and CRIS synchronized according to well-defined consistency constraints, and satisfy several "well-behavedness" properties, such as correctness or stability. A user interface to act as a front-end for these synchronization procedures is also proposed by PTCRISync.

What it needs

• Access to the ORCID Member API
• The ability to convert research productions from/to the ORCID schema (currently 2.0rc2)
• A persistent local notion of "synchronized production", for productions that are to be actively kept up-to-date
• The ability to present notifications to the users to indicate newly found productions
• A fine control on the assignment of external unique identifiers to local productions

What it can do

• Keep the selected local works up-to-date in the user's ORCID profile (export works)
• Notify the user of new unique works found in the ORCID profile (import works)
• Notify the user of new meta-data for known works found in the ORCID profile (import updates)

What it cannot do

• It cannot modify ORCID works created by the user or other sources
• Directly modify local works (follows a notification paradigm)
• Synchronize works without valid external identifiers
• Synchronize research activities other than productions/works (yet)

Who should use it

PTCRISync should be used by CRIS service managers and developers who wish to use ORCID as a central hub for the synchronization of research outputs.

Where to start

• The architecture of PTCRISync
• An overview of relevant ORCID concepts and requirements for adopting CRIS services
• The actual synchronization procedures
• A suggested interface to deploy the synchronization procedures
• Scenarios that can be used both to clarify the synchronization procedures with all stakeholders, and to be used as test cases to verify the conformity of the implementation.

Further reading

• Technical documentation
• The published description of the PTCRIS framework
• The methodology followed in the development of PTCRISync
• The [formal model](last version 0.5), that allowed for the automatic verification of the properties and the automatic generation of the scenarios
• The technical report, superseded by this wiki (last version 0.5)