TUCfis: A holistic research information management approach to support the digital transformation of a university

Christoph Göpfert, Dang Nguyen Hai Vu, André Langer, Sebastian Heil, Martin Gaedke

Keywords: Research Information System, VIVO, Reusability, Use Case, Web Components

TL;DR: The talk presents lessons learnt from the practical adoption of VIVO for use case specific requirements implemented in the TUCfis project.

Abstract:

In 2019, Chemnitz University of Technology (TUC) started working on the TUCfis project - a new Research Information System to collect and provide structured academic information. In this talk, we want to share our practical experiences with the adoption of the VIVO base platform for realizing TUCfis as well as the challenges we faced during the recent development period.

Knowledge and technology transfer between an academic institution and partners in the economy has gained importance in recent years. Universities seek to increase the visibility of their research activities and offered services, whereas business companies primarily focus on available expertise and services. In the past, this information was provided in a distributed fashion which made it challenging, especially for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME), to contact a university for cooperative activities. To fulfill requests from these stakeholders, we extended TUCfis to become a central point for providing easy-to-access information related to expertise and offered services.

Although the data contained in TUCfis can be accessed through various endpoints, this operation is still difficult for non-tech-savvy people. For the purpose of facilitating data access and data reusability, we follow a web component-based approach to integrate information from TUCfis into other pages of the university's website.

During the development process, we still have to deal with many data challenges: incompleteness, inconsistency, inaccuracy, for which we had to create a handling strategy. Besides, since our data partially contains private information, we have to provide a fine-grained access control at the user level to align with the university's data privacy demands.

As a result, our team learned valuable strategies and took practical decisions. We intend to share them with the VIVO community.