Foveal adopts the MortarCAPS Data Standard

MortarCAPS is an independent not-for-profit that stewards MCDS, a peer-reviewed, sector-owned data standard for higher and vocational education. It is built on the CAUDIT Higher Education Reference Model (HERM) and standardises the entities, semantics and exchange formats that universities, TAFEs, vendors and regulators need in order to work as one sector rather than hundreds of disconnected silos.

The standard spans 24 domains and more than 5,400 entities, and has more than 190 institutions engaged across Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK. Research is one of its domains.

No single vendor controls it. MortarCAPS does not sell software; it governs the standard, convenes the sector and protects its neutrality. That is exactly why we wanted turnKeyRM to be built on it.

Anyone who has worked in a research office knows the problem. The same grant, project, partner and output get typed into the funder portal, the finance system, the research management system and a dozen spreadsheets, each with its own field names and its own version of the truth. Reporting becomes reconciliation.

A shared data standard fixes this at the source. When a project in turnKeyRM is defined the same way a project is defined in a university's student, HR or finance systems, data can move between them without being re-keyed or re-interpreted. Integration gets cheaper. Reporting gets faster. The record gets more trustworthy.

It also means turnKeyRM customers are not locked into a proprietary data model that only one vendor understands.

Adopting a standard is one thing. Helping to shape it is another.

As a licensed vendor, Foveal now sits on the MortarCAPS research administration sub working group, which meets fortnightly. This is where the research domain of the standard is debated, refined and extended by people who run research offices, build research systems and report to funders every day.

That gives us direct access to the thinking behind best-practice design, well before it lands in a published version. Because turnKeyRM incorporates the data standard, that insight flows straight into the platform. When the sector decides how a research project, a partner contribution or a research output should be described, turnKeyRM customers inherit that decision rather than having to retrofit it later.

Nothing changes overnight. Existing customers keep working as they do today. What changes is the direction of of our work: turnKeyRM will track the MortarCAPS research domain as it matures, so that the platform stays aligned with how the wider sector describes research, and so that integrating with institutional systems built on the same standard gets progressively simpler.

“turnKeyRM has always been built on the principle that research organisations shouldn't have to build their own systems from scratch. Adopting the MortarCAPS standard extends that to the data model itself: our customers inherit a shared, sector-owned definition of research, and through the working group we help shape it.”

— Wojciech Nadachowski, Managing Director, Foveal

If you want to understand what MCDS alignment could mean for your research office, or you would like to see how turnKeyRM is applying it, get in touch.