Persistent Identification of Instruments

Markus Stocker,Rolf Krahl,Ulrich Schwardmann,Ted Habermann,Ingemar Häggström,Louise Darroch,Claudio D’Onofrio,Anusuriya Devaraju

doi:10.5334/dsj-2020-018

Abstract

Instruments play an essential role in creating research data. Given the importance of instruments and associated metadata to the assessment of data quality and data reuse, globally unique, persistent and resolvable identification of instruments is crucial. The Research Data Alliance Working Group Persistent Identification of Instruments (PIDINST) developed a community-driven solution for persistent identification of instruments which we present and discuss in this paper. Based on an analysis of 10 use cases, PIDINST developed a metadata schema and prototyped schema implementation with DataCite and ePIC as representative persistent identifier infrastructures and with HZB (Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin fur Materialien und Energie) and BODC (British Oceanographic Data Centre) as representative institutional instrument providers. These implementations demonstrate the viability of the proposed solution in practice. Moving forward, PIDINST will further catalyse adoption and consolidate the schema by addressing new stakeholder requirements.

Highlights

Between March 2018 and October 2019, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Working Group (WG) Persistent Identification of Instruments (PIDINST) explored a community-driven solution for globally unambiguous and persistent identification of operational scientific instruments
Use case descriptions included an introduction to the domain and infrastructure, related work by the infrastructure, and a table describing the required properties of instrument metadata associated with the persistent identifier
The metadata properties were described for their name, occurrence, definition, value datatype, and an indication whether properties should be in metadata held by the Persistent identifiers (PIDs) infrastructure or the institutional instrument provider, for instance on the landing page

Summary

Introduction

Between March 2018 and October 2019, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Working Group (WG) Persistent Identification of Instruments (PIDINST) explored a community-driven solution for globally unambiguous and persistent identification of operational scientific instruments. Instruments can be static (e.g., weather station, laboratory instrument) or mobile when mounted on moving platforms (e.g., remotely operated underwater vehicles, drones). They may be used in observation or experimentation research activities. They may be owned and operated by individual researchers, research groups, national, international or global research infrastructures or other types of institutions.

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Discussion

Conclusion