Knowledge Base
Core enterprise product for aggregating, managing, and exposing university research information, integrating data from multiple internal and external systems into a unified research knowledge platform.
High-Level Overview#
The Knowledge Base is the company’s flagship product and a large-scale enterprise system used by universities to collect, integrate, and expose research-related information. It functions as a unified research knowledge platform by combining the roles of a Current Research Information System (CRIS), an Institutional Repository (IR), and a Research Profiling System (RPS).
The system aggregates data from numerous external sources - such as university management systems, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and other academic databases - and makes this data searchable, interlinked, and reusable across multiple institutional use cases.
Today, the platform is deployed at more than 50 universities and serves as a critical component of their research and reporting infrastructure.
My Responsibilities#
I worked on the Knowledge Base as part of the core product development team. My responsibilities included:
- Designing and implementing new product features.
- Integrating additional external systems, primarily through ETL pipelines for both data import and export.
- Ongoing maintenance, support, and incremental refactoring of a large, long-lived codebase.
- Ensuring reliability and performance of a system operating at enterprise scale.
System Characteristics#
From a technical and architectural perspective, the Knowledge Base is characterized by:
- A flexible and extensible data model capable of supporting many types of research outputs (publications, projects, datasets, multimedia, theses, etc.).
- Strong emphasis on data interoperability and reuse across different functional areas of the system.
- Full-text search and indexing powered by Apache Solr.
- Distributed caching and performance optimization using Hazelcast.
- Integration-driven architecture connecting dozens of heterogeneous external systems.
Business and Institutional Value#
By consolidating research metadata, full-text resources, and researcher profiles into a single system, the Knowledge Base:
- Improves visibility of university research outputs.
- Supports strategic decision-making by university leadership.
- Reduces operational and maintenance costs by replacing multiple disconnected systems.
- Enables reliable reporting to national and international authorities.
This project gave me long-term experience working on a mature, mission-critical enterprise product with real institutional impact, as well as deep exposure to data integration, search, and system evolution at scale.