GRID has been broadly adopted in the Digital Science portfolio companies to facilitate data exchange, increase functionality, and support novel features. We think these benefits should be shared more widely in the scientific community to foster innovation and increase interoperability.
What data is included in GRID?
GRID is comprised of a worldwide collection of institutes associated with academic research. The institutes contained are distinguished by a unique identifier, GRID ID. Each unique GRID record also contains relevant metadata, as well as relationships between associated institutes.
What metadata is included?
GRID records contain a wealth of metadata obtained from trusted sources. Among these we include established dates, name aliases, acronyms and geolocation. Additionally we include links to external webpages such as wikipedia and official websites, as well as external identifiers such as ISNI, GeoNames and Fundref.
What types of relationships are included?
GRID records can display relationships between each other. We currently model two types of relationships. A relationship that defines a subordinate association, called a parent-child relationship
and a relationship that describes other associations, called a related relationship.
How do we add data to GRID?
Data extracted from research funding grants and research paper affiliations is formatted into source data. In this format, source data is associated manually to the corresponding GRID record in a process called mapping. Whenever a source data row can not be mapped to a GRID record, a new record is created. Records are named by using the generally recognised name of the institution, which is determined by querying the official website, encyclopaedic records and other trusted data sources.