CERIF model and the requirements of a government organization

Geert Van Grootel ¹

¹ Vlaamse Overheid, Departement Economie, Wetenschap en Innovatie, Brussels, Belgium

e-mail: geert.vangrootel@ewi.vlaanderen.be

The EWI department of the Flemish government requires information on R&D expenditure and results. There are multiple sources of such information: from the funding council (FWO) and from the universities which obtain R&D funding from several sources. There is overlap between the information from funding sources and the universities, and also inconsistencies. EWI has attempted to construct a ‘crossroads database’ to provide a unique record of R&D activity in Flanders. It is using the CERIF model and the requirements have pushed some of the further developments of the CERIF model from its 2000 edition to the present 2008 version. The key aspects of CERIF that are used are: (1) the flexible relationships between instances of major entities (such as between person and organisation) with temporal duration and role information; (2) the ability to utilise more than one classification system and to inter-relate those classification systems; (3) the ability to manage multilinguality; (4) the ability to have independently declared semantics over the data structures.