Professor Justin Smith¹ is the head of a national research group in nanotechnology. He has been given the task of developing a strategic roadmap that will guide the development of nanotechnology within his research organization over the next two decades.

Smith manages numerous research projects and needs to be aware of their research outputs, and keep track changes to their operations. He also needs to be kept appraised of international research trends so that his national projects are globally competitive.

To keep in touch with trends, Professor Smith relies extensively on the rich semantic, or relationship-centric, structure of the Global Registries service. The abundant interlinking nature of the Global Registries also allows him to view all the intertwining links between his projects and people, and the global research community. The discovery portal displays a list of all his projects which are linked to the corresponding investigators, developers and data collections, and in turn links them to all the relevant networks and collaborations. He uses this information, for example, to help him locate talented people for projects, manage resources, build and maintain national and international networks and collaborations, and position nanotechnology as a vital field in world affairs.

Smith also subscribes to the Global Registries Atom feed and email notification service in order to monitor developments within his research portfolio. He can also export a range of statistics (such as total number of projects, their locations, their investigators, affiliated networks etc.) to a spreadsheet or word-processing document for reporting and benchmarking purposes.

The Global Registries provides Professor Smith the capacity to extend and refine his strategic vision and to readily adapt to arising developments via its robust and intuitive semantic layout and notification systems.

¹ Justin Case is a fictional persona, as are all others described here. Image Disclaimer: All images of people are sourced from Flickr under the Creative Commons licence and are for illustrative purposes only.