Motivation

A PIC (Participant Identification Code) is a unique identifier that the European Union assigns to organisations that register when participating in EU funding and tender opportunities.

The ROR (Research Organization Registry) is a community-led project to assign a unique identifier for every research organisation in the world.

Currently there is no link between an organisation's PIC and its ROR identifier.

An issue was created, requesting that ROR metadata is updated so it may hold an organisation's PIC. This would be similar to ROR's support for other external identifiers.

While updating ROR to include an organisation's PIC is the preferred solution, it is not clear that this change matches ROR's vision. ROR is community-driven and such change would require consultation. Additionally, (at time of writing) building the infrastructure to maintain the existing ROR metadata is a higher priority changing the data model is not a priority.

This repository exists to fill this gap.

It contains the code needed to generate a link between an organisation's PIC and it's ROR identifier.

There are two main reasons why this repository exists:

1. To document the process through which the two idenfiers are matched.

   This allows people to verify the methology, point out any problems, and potentially suggest ways of improving the output.

2. By automating the process, the process may be re-run as more organisations are included in CORDIS and ROR.

The goal is to provide a database of PIC to ROR values. The latest results are available from this link.

Therefore, although the code should be runnable by anyone, the intention is not that people need to run this code to obtain the list of corresponding identifiers.

Contents

This repository contains several files. Here is a list of the most important ones and what is their function.

bin/acquire-data

Acquire CORDIS and ROR data dumps. This caches data, so the same function may be used to check for any updates.

process.py

Build a mapping of PIC to ROR identifiers and store the result as the file pic-to-ror.json

print-cordis.py

Parse the CORDIS organization.csv file from the data dump and print the results.

print-wikidata.py

Query Wikidata for EU VAT number to ROR identifier mapping and print the result.

scan-wikidata-for-orphans

This queries Wikidata for all organisations for which it has a corresponding ROR identifier and then compares those identifiers with those present in the ROR data dump. This catches orphaned links.

How to run

You will need to run bin/acquire-data at least once, to obtain the CORDIS and ROR data dumps.

You can rerun this command to check for any updates. This is safe because the downloaded data is cached and the script checks to see if the cached copy is up-to-date before downloading it.

Once you've have the CORDIS and ROR data dumps, run process.py to generate the mapping file: pic-to-ror.json.