PIDfest 26

In this session you will learn about the recent efforts in Finland to compile a national landscape of research infrastructures and services for research. The aim of these efforts is to improve the utilisation of research infrastructures through their services, to predict future capacity needs for projects and to enable researchers and research organisations to better find suitable services to their needs. You will also hear about national interoperable data models for describing services for research and research infrastructures, developed in co-operation with Finnish research organisations and infrastructure experts. Both models have been aligned with the EOSC Service Catalogue Schema to support researcher’s access to digital resources on a national level via EOSC Finland Pilot Node and globally on EOSC Federation levels. These models have been taken into use in Research.fi (the national CRIS), CSC and EOSC Finland Pilot Node.
Research infrastructures are defined as entities (i.e. equipment, facilities, networks, etc.) which enable research and development of technology. They typically form networked structures in which individual RIs are linked together to create larger research infrastructures. To support this and make multi-organisational updating possible a decentralised approach for information management was needed. Another necessary step was to define research infrastructure services as providing access to the research infrastructure. Research infrastructure services then become a subset of all services available for research. A key observation for keeping the data easily up to date was to specify that metadata of each research infrastructure and its services are governed by an individual research organisation. Assigning PIDs to every RI was vital insight that enabled the entire decentralised networked approach to become a reality.
Implementations in Research.fi, CSC and EOSC Finland Pilot Node assign PIDs to RIs and services that lack them. You will hear about our processes to support the organisations by assigning and upkeep of persistent identifiers in a centralized manner and how persistent identifiers and machine-readable APIs keep the information up to date and enabling different use cases. All descriptive information should be maintained within organisations own systems to ensure smooth update processes for the people in charge of the RIs and services.
One of the major values of our efforts so far is that we have been able to agree on data models nationally and take into consideration various use cases, different needs and perspectives. Common, interoperable data models allow to produce measurable, comparable and findable information that is usable in many different implementations. PIDs make it possible to always refer to the same entity in research outputs, projects and other research activities even though the descriptive information changes over time. This enables tracking and proving the impact of RIs and RI-services.
As the use cases for RI and service information grow, distributing the metadata in a machine-readable and interoperable format enables other actors to create tailored user interfaces for different target groups and to integrate service metadata to other, organisation level or distributed service catalogues.