Towards a Semantic Interoperable Flemish Research Information Space. Development and Implementation of a Flemish Application Profile for Research Datasets.

In Flanders, Research Performing Organizations (RPO) are required to provide information on publicly financed research to the Flemish Research Information Space (FRIS), a current research information system and research discovery platform hosted by the Flemish Department of Economics, Science and Innovation. FRIS currently discloses information on researchers, research institutions, publications, and projects. Flemish decrees on Special and Industrial research funding, and the Flemish Open Science policy require RPOs to also provide metadata on research datasets to FRIS. To ensure accurate and uniform delivery of information across all information providing institutions on research datasets to FRIS, it is necessary to develop a common application profile for research datasets. Therefore, a Flemish application profile for research datasets was developed by the Flemish Open Science Board (FOSB) Working Group Metadata and Standardization. The main challenge was to achieve interoperability among stakeholders, which in part had existing metadata schemes and research information infrastructures in place, while others were still in the early stages of development.