PID Graph enriches information in Dutch research portal NARCIS.
Within FREYA, DANS has been working on a PID Graph demonstrator to enrich information displayed in NARCIS. NARCIS is the Dutch national portal for information about researchers and their work, and it contains information about publications, datasets, scientists, research projects, and organizations.
As such, NARCIS itself already contains many PIDs as they are included in the metadata of the digital objects. Publications can contain a DOI, Handle, ISBN or URN and researchers are often identified with their ORCID, ISNI, ResearcherID or DAI (Digital Author Identifier).
One of the first efforts within FREYA has been to make even more PIDs accessible in NARCIS. For instance, we have been working on adding organizational identifiers so that organizations can now also be unambiguously identified by PIDs, like ROR, GRID or ISNI. In addition, we are considering PIDs for grants and other digital objects which can also be integrated into the NARCIS PID-Graph.
Next to adding PIDs like ROR, the work in FREYA has also enabled us to enrich NARCIS with information that is located in other portals, through PIDs and their relationships. For example, we can now extract a specific ORCID from NARCIS, retrieve all PIDs that are connected to this ORCID from ORCID.org, and compare the resulting information with the PIDs already contained within NARCIS. In this way, additional relationships can be established, for example between DOIs of publications present in NARCIS and the ORCID of a specific researcher. Information that is enriched in such a way, through external information can be recognized by the NARCIS PID-Graph icon (see figure below) showing our users the relationship has been obtained by a third party.
NARCIS PID Graph Icon
A good example to illustrate the process is Spinoza winner Sinninghe Damsté. NARCIS was first able to link 580 publications to this researcher through a Digital Author Identifiers (DAI) that had already been included in the metadata by various organizations. Yet NARCIS contained many more publications where he is mentioned as an author, but these publications do not contain a person identifier in the metadata. By retrieving the DOIs of his publications from ORCID.org, NARCIS can now link these publications and expand the list of publications to more than 800. Other personal identifiers such as ResearcherID are also retrieved and linked to the existing NARCIS data.
This is only a first step and we plan to develop the NARCIS PID Graph further in the final year of the FREYA project. There are many more options for linking scientific information based on PIDs. NARCIS already links a DOI to services such as Altmetric and Unpaywall. However, there are also possibilities to add extra publications from other sources to NARCIS, for example citations from Microsoft Academic Search. ORCID.org also offers information about the workplace (often with an ISNI), training, grants, keywords and the like, all information that may be used in the future to enrich the information NARCIS can display. Moreover, services such as DataCite, CrossRef and Scholix provide information about relationships between datasets and publications. In fact, the PID Graph offers infinite possibilities for reliably linking scientific information to each other and presenting it in NARCIS which we will continue to further exploit in the future.