PIDapalooza 2021

The research.fi portal implements the concept of interconnecting different types of research outputs and research actors mostly though the utilisation of Permanent Identifiers (PIDs). The PID graph concept was introduced by Fenner and Aryani (1), which presents an approach that proposes the use of RESTful APIs. Our research.fi is a national portal that currently handles data integration via other less dynamic mechanisms, but still achieves the endgoal of interconnected research outputs. This is an active area of development, with other efforts on-going, such as the OpenAIRE Research Graph (2), Research Graph (3) , Scholix (4).

(For missing figure 1, see research output type banner at: https://research.fi/en/ )

The research.fi aims to connect publications, with corresponding funding decisions, with research infrastructures and research datasets used in the study. While the data can be browsed by any aspect, and the linked data navigated through interconnected links, from our service design perspective, the central node in this graph is the researcher. That being said, many of the connections do not directly involve researchers. A user can view data from different perspectives, such as :
1) Datasets resulting from a given infrastructure
2) Datasets and publications generated under a given funding decision
3) Funding awarded to organisations
4) A given researcher’s publications, funding decisions, datasets, etc…

The research.fi service was published in June 2020 with the data types shown in figure 1. The incorporation of the additional data types is on-going. Naturally we will have the same hurdle as the other concurrent efforts, which is to find the information on how these different types of data items are connected to each other. Integrated systems have provided possibilities to give information e.g. on the projects relating to datasets, but such voluntary information is not frequently volunteered by the researchers entering data. The simplest and most unique way to establish these connections is via the use of PIDs. E.g. a connection from a publication to an author is made, when the user gives her ORCID identifier when submitting a paper to a journal.
Once the connections are established, many of the dataproviders are interested to read back the enriched connection data to the data that they have provided.

References
(1) Fenner, M., Aryani, A., 2019. Introducing the PID Graph — FREYA [WWW Document]. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5438/jwvf-8a66
(2) https://zenodo.org/record/2600275#.X4XLfWgzY2w
(3) https://researchgraph.org/
(4) http://www.scholix.org/