Cultivating CRIS for RDM: Technical Foundations for Sustainable Research Information Management at NFDI4Culture

At NFDI4Culture, research data provides the fertile humus [1] from which our overarching vision grows: Shared Data, Shared Practice, Shared Knowledge. Our research data management, therefore, goes beyond enabling the discovery of data related to tangible and intangible cultural heritage: we actively support researchers in managing their data by making relevant resources, such as guidelines, software, and data portals, more findable for the communities under our umbrella. To this end, the consortium develops a Current Research Information System (CRIS) to collect structured metadata [2] and provide them to European infrastructures, such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). This effort relies on active community engagement, strong consortial collaboration, and sustainable, long-term software solutions. At this year's CoRDI, we aim to present three of its core components: 1. The Culture Information Portal, serving as a central access point to all consortial resources and integrating consortial services, such as the Educational Resource Finder, the Registry for Research Tools and Data Services, the Culture Knowledge Base and the Research Output Index; 2. The NFDI4Culture Metadata API, making the portal's research information metadata available as Linked Open Data (LOD) based on the NFDIcore Ontology; 3. The Culture Knowledge Graph, providing research information via a SPARQL endpoint for further data exploration and processing, such as a reporting pipeline via NocoDB. The Culture Information Portal and NFDI4Culture Metadata API are built on the open-source Content Management System (CMS) TYPO3, widely used in the German academic landscape and maintained by an active community [3]. It supports content management for the consortium, allowing editors to contribute community-relevant information (e.g. news and events). To ensure interoperability with European infrastructures, such as the OpenAIRE Graph and the EOSC EU Node Resource Hub, a dedicated TYPO3 extension is used based on the CERIF data model from euroCRIS. This Academy Extension enables the structured collection of information on e.g. persons, organisations, products (e.g. software), and publications following the OpenAIRE Guidelines for CRIS Managers [4,5]. Long-term access to CRIS resources is ensured through resolvable IRIs, generated via another generic TYPO3 extension for LOD. It also facilitates the provision of metadata through REST-APIs in various RDF-serialisations (e.g. RDFa, Turtle, JSON-LD) and mappings to external systems, such as Wikidata. To enrich the expressiveness of research information, the NFDIcore Ontology is used in the NFDI4Culture Metadata API allowing interoperability with other NFDI consortia [6]. As a mid-level ontology grounded in the process-oriented BFO 2020 framework [7,8], NFDIcore applies state-of-the-art ontology design principles to achieve semantic consistency and interoperability. Additionally, it contains mappings to vocabularies such as DCAT, schema.org, and the information artefact ontology [9], relevant for the description of research information. Metadata from the NFDI4Culture Metadata API is integrated into the Culture Knowledge Graph via the Culture Knowledge Graph Kitchen – a flexible Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) environment [10]. The graph connects metadata on research information with metadata on cultural-heritage data, enabling cross-resource querying, and serving as an additional backend for views in the portal itself and an exploration service based on Shmarql.