Modeling the context of scientific information: Mapping VIVO and CERIF

Abstract

Institutional repositories (IR) and Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) among other kinds of systems store and manage information on the context in which research activity takes place. Several models, standards and ontologies have been proposed to date as a solution to give coherent semantics to research information. These present a large degree of overlap but also present very different approaches to modeling. This paper presents a contrast of two of the more widespread models, the VIVO ontology and the CERIF standards, and provides directions for mapping them in a way that enables clients to integrate data coming from heterogeneous sources. The majority of mapping problems have risen from the representation of VIVO sub-hierarchies in CERIF as well as from the representation of CERIF attributes in VIVO. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.