The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) produces wide range of outputs (e.g., publications, spatial and non-spatial data) in different repositories. These repositories are: 1) a Dataverse instance hosted by Harvard University for storing non-spatial data; 2) a DSPace hosted by CGIAR for storing publications; 3) CCAFS Climate, a custom developed portal for accessing spatial data hosted in the cloud and; 4) Agri-trials, a custom developed portal for accessing Agricultural trials hosted in the cloud. All these four repositories index data independently using separate metadata schemas.
The CGIAR System Organization has been developing a common metadata schema called “CG Core” which is intended to standardize a minimum of metadata elements applicable across CGIAR Centres. The idea behind a common metadata schema is to be able to integrate different metadata from different repositories across all centres into one common searchable index. With one common index in place then is possible to search for CGIAR outputs across centres. A prerequisite for this to happen is to have all centre’s repositories metadata aligned to “CG Core” and being able to harvest such metadata using APIs. CCAFS is currently at different stages in implementing “CG Core”, its Dataverse and DSpace installations mostly comply with the standard schema and metadata for the two repositories is accessible using APIs.
This proposal aims to create a unifying search (one-stop shop) for both CCAFS publications and datasets. Though it is possible to search in Dataverse and CGspace for the same keywords, the results cannot be truly integrated in one search because both repositories have independent indexes. For example searching for “Kenya” as a facet for both repositories will bring datasets and publications related to Kenya however, it is not possible to calculate related resources in linked facets like for example “Maize” because the calculation is done independently for each repository. This proposal thus focuses in creating a unified index for both CGSpace and Dataverse.