Design and Development of Iranian Institutional Repositories Integrated Search (IRIS) Portal

The purpose of this research is to design and develop an integrated open portal for searching and retrieving information of institutional repositories of universities, and higher education and research institutes in Iran. This paper discusses the collection and aggregative infrastructures, conceptual model, and architectural design and components that a practical institutional repository search portal should have. Iranian Institutional Repositories Integrated Search (IRIS) Portal architecture and services are designed as the first such example in the country. A functional development of this portal will be provided as a local system after implementation. In the process of designing and developing IRIS based on some background knowledge expanded after reviewing and collecting information of scientific texts and their methodologies, needs and feasibility assessment of existing infrastructure at the national level, analyzing similar international systems, the initial product implementation plan called “Design and Development of Iranian Institutional Repositories Integrated Search (IRIS) Portal” were targeted along with all the details of the subsystems and related workflows. In the system development process of this research, in five stages Scrum agile framework was used as an iterative and incremental methodology to control IRIS software project management. For designing and developing of this system, we reviewed similar models used in other countries. The general architecture of this system is based on the data provider and service provider model using the OAI standard. In the architecture of this system, three major parts of data mining system, data processing management system and entities linking, and finally the provision system were considered. In the design of IRIS system, features such as ease of use (user friendliness), customizable and extensible web user interface (especially with common languages), high visibility by search engine and indexing tools, permanent access to resources, support for search logic and a unique identifier for each document were considered. What is very important in the development of this system is the need to publish data freely and under open and permanent source licenses. Otherwise, one cannot expect the development of a suitable system that can mine, collect and aggregate data in an integrated manner. After implementing the system, it was found that the data entered in the data providers in this model, mainly had structural problems, and eventually the IRIS service may encounter some defects. It seems that by preparing policies by the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology (MSRT), it is possible to ensure the regular updating and loading of data in organizational repositories and finally the IRIS system.