This post continues from the REF Reporting Profile in CERIF (Intro) and elaborates on the employed CERIF entities for the REF reporting format. Building a profile in CERIF requires at first the identification of the relevant entities and their relationships.

Selected CERIF entities for the REF Reporting Profile

The green squares and lines represent the CERIF REF Reporting Profile. In the formal CERIF model also relationships are entities. They are called link entities, maintain a semantically agnostic name (syntax) and link entities such as e.g. person with organisation (cfPerson_OrganisationUnit) or project (cfPerson_Project). In formal CERIF terms, each entity and each relationship has a defined name, i.e. syntax.

The formal definition of the REF Reporting Profile in CERIF requires an aggregation of the relevant entities to describe the concepts – these are as follows:

• Institution: cfOrgUnit, cfOrgUnit_OrgUnit, cfOrgUnit_Class
• Staff: cfPers, cfPersName, cfPersName_Pers, cfPers_Class, cfPers_OrgUnit, cfPers_ResPubl, cfPers_ResPat, cfPers_ResProd, cfPers_Event
• Outputs: cfResPubl, cfResPubl_Class, cfResPubl_cfResPubl
• Outputs: cfResProd, cfResProd_Class, cfResProd_ResProd, cfResPubl_ResProd
• Outputs: cfResPat, cfResPat_Class, cfResPat_ResPat, cfResPubl_ResPat
• Outputs: cfEvent, cfEvent_Class, cfResPubl_Event
• Environments, Circumstances, Impact, Case Studies: cfMeas, cfMeas_Class, cfSrv_Meas, cfOrgUnit_Meas, cfPers_Meas, cfResPubl_Meas, cfResProd_Meas, cfResPat_Meas
• Submission Contacts: cfEAddr, cfPers_EAddr, cfOrgUnit_PAddr
• Submission Contacts: cfPAddr, cfPers_PAddr, cfOrgUnit_PAddr

• Federated Identifiers: cfFedId
• Employed Vocabularies: cfClass, cfClassScheme

Having selected the profiles’ entities, requires in a next step the employment of vocabularies. The vocabulary terms allow for a meaningful labelling of the link entities, such as: Manager in cfProj_Pers, or cfPers_OrgUnit, or e.g. Author in cfPers_ResPubl.

See: REF Reporting Profile in CERIF (Vocab)