IS History

2007-08-03

Instituto Stela

Instituto Stela was created in September 2002 and immediately underwent a period of strategic planning before starting its activities from its own premises in the beginning of 2005. The establishment of the Institute as a nonprofit organization reflects the philosophy guiding the group of researchers who conceived it: applied research and technological innovation geared toward the development of the Brazilian society. The Institute, which is horizontally organized around five departments and one strategic research center, adopts the policy of encouraging everyone’s participation in projects and decision making processes. The legal framework of nonprofit organizations instructs that excess cash be reinvested in the organization itself, in the training of staff, promotion of scientific and technological events, and in research. In other words, research and the encouragement for personal and academic development of Instituto Stela’s collaborators are among its top priorities.

The genesis of Instituto Stela is to be found in the Federal University of Santa Catarina – UFSC – and can be traced back to 1995, when a group of students in the Graduate Program in Production Engineering of that university gathered to create the Stela Group. The creation of this group was determined by a challenge they took upon themselves: to create a system to automate the administration processes of their Graduate Program, especially student enrollment, and academic control activities. The outcome, in the following year, was the implementation of a system that was born with the same feature that, to this day, still distinguishes this group of researchers: innovation. The system, dubbed Stela Platform, was the first in the country to allow graduate students to enroll themselves through touchscreen terminals and over the Internet.
The successful initiative was taken by the national media as an example to be modeled. The sudden notoriety encouraged the group to pursue further challenges and brought new contributors on board. The group also pioneered the initiative of maintaining and granting access to the first free, online world library of theses and dissertations (BTD).

In 1997, in a partnership with the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), the group developed the third version of the Brazilian Research Groups Directory, assembling in an intelligent way all information on research groups operating in Brazil. This project was the embryo of the Lattes Platform, soon to be developed. Stela researchers started works on the Lattes Platform in 1998 and designed all its architecture, projects and 138 products that comprise the platform.

Lattes systems provided the formation of an integrated information database applicable to research-fostering actions and S&T planning and management. Before the adoption of the Lattes Platform, the CNPq stored in its archives the curricula of 35 thousand researchers – both in paper and electronic forms – accumulated in seven years. Two years after the system was launched, stored curricula went up to 124 thousand and have reached 1 million in 2007. In addition to enlarging this database, the system allows data to be updated constantly by researchers themselves. The efficacy and potentialities of the platform drew the attention of international organizations. During a health area congress, held in São Paulo, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) started to negotiate with CNPq the utilization of the system in a network of Ibero-American countries. The discussions led Stela Group to build an integrated information platform for Latin America, between 2001 and 2002, and offer a version of Lattes Curriculum – CvLac – for those countries. Initially, these versions allowed the inclusion of data on health professionals only. At the request of S&T administrators from several countries, the project was expanded into other areas of knowledge. The discussion process provided the basis for the consolidation of the ever expanding and improving ScienTI Network, present in over a dozen countries in the Americas and Europe.

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