ERGO Public Launch

The European Research Gateways On-line project will be launched on 9 December 1998, providing convenient access to a wide range of European R&D databases. The ERGO service will provide a single gateway to national databases of research projects via a central catalogue and user...

The European Research Gateways On-line project will be launched on 9 December 1998, providing convenient access to a wide range of European R&D databases. The ERGO service will provide a single gateway to national databases of research projects via a central catalogue and user-friendly search form.

ERGO will help disseminate the results of European research and encourage exploitation by establishing an initial reference point for R&D queries throughout Europe. This will make it easier for scientists to find information on unfamiliar databases outside their native country.

The ERGO system currently holds over 71,000 project records on 12 databases from 11 information providers, and should give access to R&D catalogues from some 20 to 30 European information systems by mid 1999. It offers two types of search facilities, a free text search box or a more detailed catalogue search.

Access to ERGO will be available through the CORDIS home page or at the address given below. The databases currently available on ERGO are:

- Austria - FODOK;
- Germany - FORIS;
- Denmark - DANDOK DATABASE;
- European Union - CORDIS;
- Finland - HUT RESEARCH REGISTER;
- Finland - TURE;
- United Kingdom - ESRC;
- Greece - HELLENIC RESEARCH PROJECTS;
- Israel - INDARD;
- Netherlands - NOD;
- Portugal - PROJMCT.

This pilot version of the ERGO service has been available on an experimental basis and running on CORDIS since July 1998.

The number of databases included in ERGO is expected to rise significantly in the next few months. The European Commission's aim is to ultimately cover several hundreds of national databases from European Member States as well as from important non-EU sources.

The ERGO Working Group, created by the INNOVATION Programme run by DG XII of the European Commission, studied the need for such a Europe wide co-operation and laid the grounds for the creation of ERGO.

The project is monitored by the ERGO Implementation Group, which meets every two months. The group representatives are themselves content providers from most countries within the European Union, and are assisted by a central ERGO team. The content providers are managing local Research Project Information Databases in their respective country. Their role is to provide contents to the central ERGO team in a specified pre-defined format. The Central ERGO team, part of the CORDIS project, orchestrates the data collection operation and ensures proper insertion into the Central ERGO Catalogue.