SWISSUbase is a national, multi-disciplinary and FAIR-compliant research data platform that provides a data repository as well as services for the curation, preservation, and dissemination of research data and metadata in Switzerland. It has been developed in partnership between FORS (Swiss Centre of Expertise for the Social Sciences), the University of Lausanne and the University of Zurich and was launched in 2021.
There are two main components to SWISSUbase. On one hand, it is an online platform where data producers, data curators and data consumers interact. On the other hand, it also provides services and support regarding research data management, data protection issues, etc.
SWISSUbase is unique from other data archiving solutions in Switzerland providing rich discipline-specific and multilingual metadata for different scientific domains. The platform offers several discipline-specific metadata schemas, currently one for linguistics and one for the social sciences. A metadata schema for the geosciences and another for the humanities are in development. Each metadata schema is elaborated in close collaboration with representatives from the respective research community, taking into account existing standards and controlled vocabularies within a discipline and specific needs of the research community. The rich metadata schemas ensure increased discoverability of the data and bring added value for the data producers and consumers. The discipline-specific standards allow for improved interoperability with disciplinary data catalogues on the international level, such as the CESSDA Data Catalogue or the CLARIN Virtual Language Observatory.
Data curation is performed by professional data curators in partner institutions, organized in a network of discipline-specific and/or institutional data service units. The data curators have extensive knowledge of the research practices and the data in their respective field, ensuring a high quality of the data and the documentation so that they can be effectively shared, reused and preserved for the long-term.
Organisations involved
Presenters
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Bojana Tasic
Bojana Tasic MSc, is the head of the unit INDEV (Infrastructure & Development) at FORS. She has over 15 years of commercial experience in full software development lifecycle, including requirements analysis, specification, architecture, design, implementation and test, both as development lead and as part of development team. Bojana Tasic graduated in Information Systems at the University of Belgrade. She has over 10 years of experience in agile and scrum environment, practical knowledge of IT matters related to the research, as well as of software industry best practices. -
Stefan Buerli
Stefan Buerli is the head of the Data Tools & Services group at FORS. A political and social scientist by training, Stefan Buerli has more than 20 years of experience in research information systems. He has also been involved in several projects pushing for easier access to data on the national level (ORD@CH – Open Research Data in Switzerland) and the European level (Data Without Boundaries – DwB). Since 2011 he has been product owner of FORSbase, a Swiss national data archiving platform for the social sciences, and of SWISSUbase since 2019. -
Jennifer Dean
Jennifer Dean has a Bachelor of Science from Texas A&M University and a Master in Human Nutrition from Colorado State University. Jennifer Dean has held various positions in the food and nutrition industry including nutrition and scientific communications and leading cross-disciplinary and cross-geography research and development projects. She is a certified Project Management Professional with expertise in leading complex projects, ensuring strong collaboration and communication between the various stakeholders. At FORS, she works as project manager, primarily on SWISSUbase.
