Universidad de Murcia - CRUE
ASIO: Semantic Architecture and Ontological Infrastructure
The project
ASIO is part of a global initiative called Hercules whose objective is to create a Research Management System (RMS) based on semantic open data that offers a global vision of the research data of the Spanish University System (SUE), in order to improve management, analysis and possible synergies between universities and stakeholders.
Hercules has been defined to improve the efficiency of R&D&I investment in Spain, increase scientific dissemination, detect synergies between Spanish universities' research and strengthen the transfer of university research to business.
ASIO has had a high component of research and development based on semantic web to homogenise the management of data, information and knowledge of Spanish universities, applying a semantic web approach for the representation, sharing and exploitation of Spanish university research information.
Challenges
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Ensuring the quality of research results data -
Storing, manage and publish ontology infrastructure data -
Creating a network of ontologies to describe research results
The solution
Izertis has provided an R&D service consisting of the development of a platform for the University of Murcia in relation to the challenge of semantic architecture and ontology infrastructure. An ontology is a formal definition that describes with fidelity and high granularity a specific domain of discussion. In this case, we have worked with a research domain (common data vocabulary), which can be extrapolated to other Spanish and international universities.
It is an innovative and efficient platform for storing, managing and publishing research data from the Spanish University System with the capacity to synchronise instances installed in different universities. By seeking to incorporate solutions that go beyond those currently available on the market, its development has required R&D tasks related to inherent problems not previously solved in the semantic web as a result of the existence of a set of information nodes that must be interoperable and are capable of exploiting information related to research on the Internet.
Among others, the platform incorporates functionalities such as: heterogeneous source importers, ETL, discovery library, scalable event-driven architecture, data publishing services, RedIris compatibility, query federation, URI factory, etc.
This platform is likely to be used in the future on a regular basis by both the University of Murcia and the other universities that are part of the CRUE.
The result
ASIO's first objective has been to create a network of ontologies that can be used to describe with fidelity and high granularity the data of the research management domain and, as a second objective, to develop an efficient semantic architecture to store, manage and publish the RMS data, with the capacity to synchronise instances installed in different universities. This will ensure data quality (consistency, controlled redundancy, relevance) in this network for all CRUE universities.
The component developed by Izertis will be natively connected to the Hercules IMS and will also be able to connect to any other management system through standard protocols. Thanks to this, the system not only offers a graphic interface for interactive and visual consultation of research data, but also allows the design of queries with the possibility of executing them in a federated way on all the nodes of the Hercules network, and displaying results dynamically in different types of graphs and maps.
In short, ASIO provides a common framework for publishing linked open data, offered as open source and easily adaptable to other domains.