Digital Science, a technology company serving the needs of scientific and research communities, has launched the Global Research Identifier Database (GRID), a free, easy-to-use online database that opens up information about research organisations worldwide to data scientists, developers and innovators within academic and commercial organisations. The GRID dataset addresses the problem of messy and inconsistent data on research institutions, ensuring that each entity is included correctly and only once.
Built in-house by Digital Science, the online database contains 50,000 manually curated institutional names, along with unique identifiers and geo-location information across 212 countries. The data are derived from openly accessible funder and publication sources such as the NIH reporter, PubMed and the UK Gateway to Research.
It includes the majority of institutions worldwide that have received research funding and is openly available under a CC-BY Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 international licence, which allows the user to share or adapt the content available for any purpose, even commercially.
GRID aims to spark innovation by providing data scientists, developers and entrepreneurs with a base of open, standardised information about organisations, which will be interoperable with existing technologies and platforms, and which can act as a gateway between many different datasets; open up insight, transparency and accuracy by allowing anyone to efficiently map data to a common, well-formed, international list of research organisations; and create accessibility by enabling data visualisation of datasets related to research organisations around the world.
At present, developers, researchers, companies, governments, civil societies, publishers and academic institutions frequently conduct analysis using 'unclean' data, where, for example, institutions are listed with multiple aliases and in different formats. GRID provides a central reference point for research work and ensures that future studies will be built on accurate underlying data.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
