Background

Currently the CRUE (Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities) is made up of 79 Universities distributed throughout the national territory, and each of them has its own management system. This means that each University has defined specific management procedures, with models and data schemes defined according to its criteria

As a result of this situation, the combined exploitation of data by third parties presents the traditional problems of interoperability of heterogeneous information sources, not based on semantic and formal specifications of data and knowledge schemes. As an example:

• Biased analysis of information needs.
• Absence of certain data of special interest.
• Application of incompatible classifications of data.
• Representation of entities at different levels of granularity.
• Difficulty discerning whether data from different sources have the same meaning

In addition to teaching, universities actively participate in research programs. The management of said participation is carried out by these proprietary management systems that are disparate and not standardized, and that support, among others, the processes of:

• Preparación y seguimiento de proyectos.
• Gestión de resultados de proyectos de I+D+i.
• Gestión económica y administrativa integrada. Contabilidad analítica.

This general situation and, specifically, with regard to research management systems, causes major inefficiencies in the management of information and knowledge of the research system of Spanish universities. This entails additional costs derived from carrying out exploitation tasks with partial sets of data in each university, which then need to be standardized.