Program of Collaborative Information Governance of Graduate Courses (GoPG)

The Collaborative Information Governance of Graduate Courses (GoPG) aims to enable actions related to interoperability among academic, scientific, technological and innovation systems, regarding information related to graduate studies, the provision of information management tools and definitions of patterns and services, in compliance with the control and protection of data involved in the process.

​Purpose
To promote governance improvement of graduation information in collaboration with actors involved in the process.

Mission
To encourage the establishment of an information ecosystem composed of individuals, processes, researches, products and technology related to graduate studies, providing means to rationalize processes and services, in order to promote the quality of information as strategic support for decision making, evaluation and visibility of Brazilian graduate programs.

Vision
Be the agent of transformations in integration processes, certification and improvement of the quality of the graduate information through collaborative management.

The identification of information entities and their most reliable and complete sources –, which may be labeled “Gold Seal” – is fundamental for the development of the ecosystem. The origin and form of identification may vary depending on the type of information:

1. Primary entities that identify only actors. In this case, there are persistent identifiers for people, graduate programs and institutions that must be used to guarantee unicity.
2. Entities using Higher Education Institutions (HEI) as identification sources, referring to activities of students (enrollments and degrees), professors (faculty members activities) and researchers. The infrastructure that the institutions offer to their graduate programs and their activities in terms of courses and research projects and the resulting products such as thesis, dissertations and their research data.
3. Entities that use outside entities as identification sources, such as funding granted by   government and non-government agencies, private companies and other sources. Intellectual productions, such as articles, books and technical-technological products all need their specific identifiers (DOI, ISSN, ISBN among others)

Information Flow will happen as follows:

1. External data capture: having identified the information entities and their sources, they will be brought to a data base (Dale Lake) where the information will go through a clearing process and disambiguate, identifying the involved actors.

2. Management Information Portals: The information will be distributed to actors, for verification and validity and then will be used in the graduate universe of information. For example: if articles are identified in different sources, the author can confirm or not her/his (professor or student) participation in the production and if the multiple registrations of the product can be unified. At the end of the process, the program coordinator and the dean will be holding a much more reliable set of information. It is important to emphasize that the portals will have their information filed automatically, with no manual completion.

3.  Importing and exporting: Once the process of analysis is completed, the coordinator of the Program will be able to import the information into Coleta on Sucupira Platform, making the whole process more expedient and of higher quality. For this procedure, a technological tool is made available, both for importing into Sucupira and for exporting data to other sources.

4. Data Collection – Sucupira: it might be manually complemented with the missing information from the automatic feeding procedure. It is expected a minimum use of manually gathered information as a result of the improvement in the cycle of automatic collection of sources and analysis of information by actors and data importation, the manual process will be minimized.  

5. Visualization (Public Portals and Observatory) in the end, better qualified information will be made available to the public through the new public Sucupira Portals and also through the new tool that will constitute the Graduate Observatory.

(Portuguese only)

Graduate Integration Network – RICAPG (Acronym in Portuguese)

RICA integrates the graduate academic-scientific community aiming to build up connections for graduate data sharing and reuse, coming up with structuring procedures for a network. Improvements in the information provided by CAPES will contribute to the implementation of new technologies for the evaluations of the programs.

 A reduction in the necessity of multiple data collecting and also reduction in data correction services submitted to CAPES operational bases is expected. The possibility of establishing connectors directly linked to the operational basis will avoid problems in the quality of information (mainly accuracy and completeness). CAPES is responsible for coordinating the network, composed of members of the academic-scientific community and graduate institutions.

The role of the network is to promote an environment for knowledge exchange and broad discussion concerning patterns established for graduate courses associated to the data infrastructure of these institutions.

RICA will be resumed in 2023, continuing the integration process which began in 2020. The patterns established by RICA will be of great help in the integration process as a whole.