On this page, you can find more information about:
- Person identifiers.
- The Person-root node in Ricgraph.
- Research outputs connected to persons.
- Example research questions.
- Videos of Ricgraph.
- Properties of nodes in Ricgraph.
Return to main README.md file.
In the research world, persons can have any number of different identifiers. Some of these are standard, generally accepted and more-or-less unique identifiers over the lifetime of a person. These are called persistent identifiers. Others are non-unique, some are specific to an organization and some are specific to a company. Examples are:
- persistent identifiers: ORCID, ISNI;
- non-unique identifiers: full name (there are persons with the same name);
- organization identifiers: employee ID, email address (will change when a person leaves an organization);
- company identifiers: Scopus Author ID.
Ricgraph uses a special node person-root. This node is connected to all the different person identifiers which have been harvested. Person-root "represents" a person. Research outputs from a person will also be connected to this person-root node. The following figure shows two examples. B is the person-root node. Click the figure to enlarge.
| a person with a few identifiers | a person with a lot of identifiers |
|---|---|
 |
 |
A person can have any number of identifiers. The person in the left figure has one ORCID, one ISNI and one FULL_NAME. The person in the right figure has a lot more identifiers, and some identifiers appear more than once. E.g. this person has two different ORCIDs and two FULL_NAMEs (with different spellings).
| one person with three research outputs | three persons with one research output | symbols for type of object | colors for source system |
|---|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
 |
The left figure shows how one person, its identifiers and research outputs are connected. The right figure shows how three persons have contributed to one research output.
The figure belows shows examples of research questions that can be answered using Ricgraph. Click the figure to enlarge.
To see a demonstration of Ricgraph, you can look at the videos we have made to demonstrate Ricgraph.
All nodes in Ricgraph have the following properties:
name: name of the node, e.g. ISNI, ORCID, DOI, FULL_NAME, SCOPUS_AUTHOR_ID, etc.;category: category of the node, e.g. person, person-root, book, journal article, data set, software, etc.;value: value of the node;_key: key value of the node, not to be modified by the user;_source: sorted list of sources a record has been harvested from, not to be modified by the user._history: list of history events of the node, not to be modified by the user.
Additional properties for nodes can be added by changing an entry in the Ricgraph initialization file. In the default configuration, the following properties are included:
comment: comment for a node;year: year of a research output;url_main: main URL for a node, pointing to e.g. the corresponding ISNI, ORCID or DOI record on the web;url_other: other URL for a node, pointing to e.g. the originating record in the source system;source_event: an event to be added to_source.history_event: an event to be added to_history.