Connecting closed world research information systems through the linked open data web

Research Information Systems (RIS) play a critical role in the sharing of scientific information and provide researchers, professionals and decision makers with the required data for their activities. Existing RIS standards have proposed data models to represent the main entities for storage and exchange. These account for the needs of multiple stakeholders through a high flexibility based on a formal syntax and declared semantics, but for techno-historical reasons they assume the completeness of information within system boundaries. The distributed nature of research information across systems calls for a mechanism to link the local entities from the closed world of concrete RISs with other possibly underspecified entities exposed through other means, as for example, the Linked Open Data Web. By transformation of a relational model into an open graph model, differences between the two system paradigms are revealed. The main principles and techniques for exposing CERIF-driven relational data as linked data will be provided as a first step demonstrating effective RISs interconnection through the linked open data (LOD) Web.