Gateway to Research

Gateway to Research The Vision: Over the next 2 years, RCUK will work to deliver a web based Portal, single public point of access to search and analyse information on: Who, what and where the Research Councils fund; The outcomes and outputs from Research Councils’ funding, linking to already available open access repositories and/or data catalogues

Purpose Public access to the 7 Research Councils’ information A consistent approach towards access to public sector research information, with a particular focus on SMEs A mechanism to identify potential partners in universities To help Research Councils to achieve a more harmonious data structure in the context of wider interoperability standards

High Profile Interest… The Project has direct Ministerial interest and Jimmy Wales has been engaged by the government as a project advisor. He has advised us to: Concentrate on making the data available in a standard format (to be CERIF); Provide only a simple interface to interrogate the data, and let interested parties do the rest (cf. Transport for London’s bus data).

Timescales By November 2012 we are required to provide: A proof of concept that will demonstrate the value of the project, the data fields to be made available and a user experience ‘focusing on research intensive SMEs’. By the end of 2013: The final system! Exploration of links to existing systems, publication databases, datasets; Real value added to the governments ‘open access’ agenda;

Pitfalls and Issues This is not an easy project: Require data sourcing from six different source systems; Even where those source systems are common (e.g. Grants), the field names are not used consistently; Councils do not use a common ontology – a data dictionary will have to be developed; Access to some data that is submitted (e.g. MRC Outcomes) cannot yet be published due to Principles of Use; Reporting. Any reporting capability that we deploy to GtR will leave us open to comparison with local RC sites, and the answer is likely to be different for the same question!

WS1 User Interface Classification/Searching Portal Development Approach Portal Development Gateway to Research Key Milestones and Activities As of 11 June 2012 WS2.2 Extract/Transform/Load Grants (M) Organisations/People (M) Outcomes (M) Student/Fellowships (C) Intramural Grants (S) Publications/Datasets (M) WS2.1 The Data Architecture Data set Technical Stack ETL Protocols finalised Data Architecture Baselined Portal Deployed Tech Stack Agreed Gateway to Research High Level Plan (November, Indicative only, not baselined) Data Dictionary produced for proposed Fields Preliminary Mapping assessment Issue Logging -long term view to correcting source data ETL Protocols Developed Mapping to emerging Data Architecture Validation of information flows JuneJulyAugustOctober/NovemberSeptember Scoping requirementsCosted options Nesta / other supplier engagement (R4d,JISC) Costed options Fields and preliminary mapping Agreed Populated Architecture Information Flow Testing Process Flow Testing Data Update Testing Subset of CERIF data required for UX Design Document Completed Development of simple interface Competitions Deployment actions – domain name, host, SSL, etc Hackfest User Stories developed – what data is publishable? Architecture Design CERIF Feasibility Study Architecture Build Iterations Multiple format download interface Scoping of Systems and Data Systems Architecture Definition Agreement on published fields UI Developer Engagement Requirements Iteration Agile Development PhaseFoundations Phase

What does success look like? November 2012: A downloadable dataset that contains cross Council, consistent information on Grants and Outcomes, with a public interface including OAI, CERIF and SPARQL (but may not be publically available) Simple UI based on centralised research council data Set of apps sourced from the market/JISC/hackfests using cutting edge technologies to demonstrate the use of the GtR data [More efficient Research Councils!] December 2013: Expanding the dataset to studentships, intra Council Grants and linking to research datasets and publication repositories An integrated Research Council ‘data depositing and harvesting experience’? Cleaning source data, resolving root data quality issues? A cross Council, dataset of Grants, Outcomes, etc in CERIF format integrated with (NSF, IPO, etc) datasets

Questions? Q How are universities are expected to interact with the systems (and their suppliers). Is there a definitive statement of RCUK plan for systems – presumably everything goes to GtR? A (remembering that 5 Councils use ROS and 2 use e-Val) Universities should be looking to ROS/e-Val to input university data to the Research Council, or build interfaces to deposit information; Universities should look (eventually) to GtR to take data from the Research Councils.

Questions Q Would it not be simpler for GtR to start as a query/reporting (output) system and evolve to do: (a) the harvesting / processing necessary for ROS linked with the CERIF data about the research activity (this will become easier as the universities all move to CERIF as well as / instead of repositories) and (b) evolve to provide the analytical reporting / visualisation that EVAL does since GtR will have much richer data (from SSC on one hand and from harvesting / input on the other). Then it can evolve to be the proper B2B connection between universities and RCs for all transactions (including university-requested reports even using push technology?) A Maybe!