Welcome to the BRII Blog

Welcome to the Building the Research information Infrastructure (BRII) Blog. My name is Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin, I am the Project Analyst for BRII. I work for the Systems and eResearch Service (SERS) part of the Oxford University Library Services (OULS). I am based at Osney One, Osney Mead in Oxford, a nice, quiet building not very far from the city centre.

The BRII project aims to gather research management information from divisions and departments of Oxford University so it may be available for a variety of different purposes. We will begin this task by undertaking a stakeholder and a user-needs analysis with the Medical Sciences division.

Due to its complexity and variety of activities that involve more than 20 departments and several hundreds of researchers the study of the Medical Sciences division will provide very valuable insights as to how research is been carried out in Oxford. We anticipate that these insights will influence future iterations of the project.

Data will then be adapted into userfriendly formats using ontologies and taxonomies based on Semantic Web technologies. We foresee that the data collected will come from disparate sources and in different unimaginable formats! These data would have been created having different purposes in mind and will display different perspectives (depending on who the owner is) as to what is the nature of research and its related activities. What we are trying to do in BRII is to convert all these data into a cohesive and interconnected unique repository of research management information. Using semantic web technologies to do this will allow us to create interconnections between the objects and people represented by the data. These can then be easily exploited by different research and administrative - purposed web services. Print this post