Harmonising and formalising research administration profiles CASRAI / CERIF

CASRAI and CERIF are international standardisation initiatives in the domain of Research Information Management. CASRAI develops and maintains a standard extensible vocabulary and exchangeable data profiles that reflect the business requirements of involved stakeholders. A data profile specifies the maximal ideal space of its application with compliant data records. CERIF is a data model supplying standard formal syntax and declared semantics to preserve the meaning inherent in identified requirements. It enables the transformation of conceptual descriptions into formal representation thereof and thus their meaningful re-use as well as a semantically compliant and syntactically valid data interchange. With this paper we share the experience, and the lessons learned from the transformation of CASRAI profiles into CERIF XML through the example of an Abridged CV

Modeling the semantics of contextual and content-specific research metadata using ontology languages: issues on combining CERIF and OWL

Current Research Information Systems (CRISs) enable the maintenance of information related to research activities of organizations and their members, including outputs or products from these activities. Such contextual information is of uttermost importance for the processing of datasets and with the retrieval of scientific documents, providing e.g. the key information on provenance and characteristics of research activities that are needed when searching for data or scholarly content. In the context of the expanding initiative of the Web of Linked Data, translating that information into semantic languages enables new ways of querying benefitting from the reuse of domain ontologies. In that direction, this paper reports on the engineering of an ontology based version of the CERIF standard for CRISs using the OWL language and a proposed mapping to research datasets

From open data to data-intensive science through CERIF

OGD (Open Government Data) is provided from government departments for transparency and to stimulate a market in ICT services for industry and citizens. Research datasets from publicly funded research commonly are associated with the open scholarly publications movement. However, the former world commonly is derived from the latter with generalisation and summarisation. There is advantage in a user of OGD being able to ‘drill down’ to the underlying research datasets. OGD encourages cross-domain research because the summarized data from different domains is more easily relatable. Bridging across the two worlds requires rich metadata; CERIF (Common European research Information Format) has proved itself to be ideally suited to this requirement. Utilising the research datasets is data-intensive science, a component of e-Research. Data-intensive science also requires access to an e-infrastructure. Virtualisation of this e-infrastructure optimizes this

An animal model in sheep for biocompatibility testing of biomaterials in cancellous bones

BACKGROUND: The past years have seen the development of many synthetic bone replacements. To test their biocompatibility and ability for osseointegration, osseoinduction and -conduction requires their placement within bone preferably in an animal experiment of a higher species. METHODS: A suitable experimental animal model in sheep with drill holes of 8 mm diameter and 13 mm depth within the proximal and distal humerus and femur for testing biocompatibility issues is introduced. RESULTS: This present sheep model allows the placing of up to 8 different test materials within one animal and because of the standardization of the bone defect, routine evaluation by means of histomorphometry is easily conducted. This method was used successfully in 66 White Alpine Sheep. When the drill holes were correctly placed no complications such as spontaneous fractures were encountered. CONCLUSION: This experimental animal model serves an excellent basis for testing the biocompatibility of novel biomaterials to be used as bone replacement or new bone formation enhancing materials

The application of the CERIF data format to Snowball metrics

The euroCRIS Indicators Task Group aims to develop and share best practice in the use of indicators to support research information management. One of the outputs of the group will be indicators expressed in CERIF that can re-used by CERIF-compliant software services to support consistent measurements for both national and international purposes. This Task Group will express multiple sets of indicators in CERIF, with Snowball Metrics being the first set to be tackled. The goal of the Snowball Metrics initiative is for research-intensive institutions to share their knowledge and experiences to agree best practice in evidence-based institutional strategic planning. Agreed and tested metrics “recipes”, or methodologies, are shared free of charge with the sector in the Snowball Metrics Recipe Book (www.snowballmetrics.com/metrics)1 for use by any organization, whether for public service or commercial purposes. One of the principles of Snowball Metrics is that they are system-agnostic: in other words, that although particular types of data are needed to support their calculation, the data can come from any relevant source such that the recipes are not tied to any one particular system or supplier of research information. The application of the CERIF data standard to the recipes is an important component in enabling benchmarking between institutions in a system-agnostic manner through the exchange of Snowball Metrics. CERIFication of Snowball Metrics is also expected to facilitate the endorsement of these recipes as global standards. The first set of recipes was agreed and tested by a group of universities in the United Kingdom, but the vision is that Snowball Metrics are supported by universities globally, and that multiple national groups contribute their expertise to agree how best to leverage the institutional and national data sources available, alongside proprietary data sources. The formation of Working Groups and the use of Snowball Metrics outside the United Kingdom demonstrate that the initiative is gaining global traction, and strongly indicate that the needs being addressed are widespread problems for which the sector would like to find a single answer. The universal nature of CERIF provides an important reference point to which it is expected that distinct but equivalent national data sources can be mapped and so used in international benchmarking

The influence of polymorbidity, revascularization, and wound therapy on the healing of arterial ulceration

Joerg Tautenhahn1, Ralf Lobmann2, Brigitte Koenig3, Zuhir Halloul1, Hans Lippert1, Thomas Buerger11Department of General, Visceral and Vascular Surgery; 2Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism; 3Institute for Medical Microbiology, Medical School, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, GermanyObjective: An ulcer categorized as Fontaine’s stage IV represents a chronic wound, risk factor of arteriosclerosis, and co-morbidities which disturb wound healing. Our objective was to analyze wound healing and to assess potential factors affecting the healing process.Methods: 199 patients were included in this 5-year study. The significance levels were determined by chi-squared and log-rank tests. The calculation of patency rate followed the Kaplan-Meier method.Results: Mean age and co-morbidities did not differ from those in current epidemiological studies. Of the patients with ulcer latency of more than 13 weeks (up to one year), 40% required vascular surgery. Vascular surgery was not possible for 53 patients and they were treated conservatively. The amputation rate in the conservatively treated group was 37%, whereas in the revascularizated group it was only 16%. Ulcers in patients with revascularization healed in 92% of cases after 24 weeks. In contrast, we found a healing rate of only 40% in the conservatively treated group (p < 0.001). Revascularization appeared more often in diabetic patients (n = 110; p < 0.01) and the wound size and number of infections were elevated (p = 0.03). Among those treated conservatively, wound healing was decelerated (p = 0.01/0.02; χ² test).Conclusions: The success of revascularization, presence of diabetes mellitus, and wound treatment proved to be prognostic factors for wound healing in arterial ulcers.Keywords: arterial leg ulcer, wound management, risk factors, revascularizatio

RARE-01: Cerebral infarction in childhood-onset craniopharyngioma patients: results of KRANIOPHARYNGEOM 2007 [Abstract]

BACKGROUND: Cerebral infarction (CI) is a known vascular complication following treatment of suprasellar tumors. Risk factors for CI, incidence rate, and long-term prognosis are unknown for patients with childhood-onset craniopharyngioma (CP). METHODS: MRI of 244 CP patients, recruited between 2007 and 2019 in KRANIOPHA-RYNGEOM 2007, were reviewed for CI. Risk factors for CI and outcome after CI were analyzed. RESULTS: Twenty-eight of 244 patients (11%) presented with CI based on reference assessment of MRI. One CI occurred before initial surgery and one case of CI occurred after release of intracystic pressure by a cyst catheter. 26 of 28 CI were detected after surgical tumor resection at a median postoperative interval of one day (range: 0.5 - 53 days). Vascular lesions during surgical procedures were documented in 7 cases with CI. No relevant differences with regard to surgical approaches were found. In all 12 irradiated patients, CI occurred before irradiation. Multivariable analyses showed that hydrocephalus and gross-total resection at the time of primary diagnosis / surgery both were risk factors for CI. After CI, quality of life (PEDQOL) and functional capacity (FMH) were impaired. CONCLUSIONS: CI occurs in 11% of surgically-treated CP cases. Degree of resection and increased intracranial pressure are risk factors, which should be considered in the planning of surgical procedures for prevention of CI

Combining VIVO and Google Scholar data as sources for CERIF linked data: a case in the agricultural domain

The needs of global science have fostered open access to the results and contextual information of research organizations at an international scale. This requires the use of standards or shared data models to exchange information preserving its semantics when transferred between systems. In that direction, standards as CERIF or projects as VIVO were developed to exchange or expose the scientific knowledge. Also, there are other sources of scientific information in the Web that are useful to complement institutional repositories and CRISes. The heterogeneity of data models behind each source in turn raises the need for mappings between them to ease interchange and aggregate information. In this paper, we present a tool that integrates three sources of research information and enables their aggregating and export into both VIVO and CERIF models. We present a case study in agriculture using OpenAGRIS, a bibliographic database linked to Web sources with more than 7 million records. Concretely, we describe the methods to combine Google Scholar data for the scholarly content indexed in OpenAGRIS and aggregating new information provided by the first one, using our tool. Finally the information is stored in a VIVO instance and then translated into CERIF using a conversion process mapping both data models. The case demonstrates the possibilities of mapping tools to aggregate and translate CRIS information