Globally unique, persistent and resolvable identifier schemas

Identifier schemas within FAIRsharing must be relevant to the community they are created for, and may be any combination of globally unique, persistent and resolvable.

This feature is in active development.

The attributes that mark a record as having one or more of the characteristics of a GUPRI within the "General Information" tab is applicable to our identifier schema records only.

If your identifier schema is globally unique, persistent and/or resolvable, then enable the appropriate tickboxes within the General Information tab.

As described in the section describing identifier schema record types, all identifier schemas registered in FAIRsharing must fit our scope. Additionally, if it also meets our definitions of globally unique, persistent and resolvable, then it can be considered a GUPRI as defined by FAIRsharing and as aligns with the EOSC PID definition.

This section of the General Information tab contains three tickboxes that allow the curation of three key attributes of GUPRIs. Please tick any box your identifier schema conforms to:

• Persistent : Must have clear community backing for the schema and its long-term maintenance. The syntax of the schema must be stable. The referred object should itself be stable, though there are various ways to show this (e.g., a dataset might be completely immutable, while a record describing an organisation is likely to change as the organisations homepage, name or other attributes change).

• Globally unique: must use a controlled syntax/namespaces to avoid clashes. If there is any way the identifier could be created as part of another identifier system (e.g. if it is a structured series of alphanumeric characters such as P12345 (UniProt Accession Number) that could theoretically be used for other identifiers) then it is not globally unique. To fulfil this requirement in practice, it generally (but not always) requires a URL prefix of some kind.

• Resolvable: humans and machines must be able to use the identifier to access information on the digital object, how the object can be accessed, or the object itself. To make it globally resolvable as per the EOSC PID definition (see our documentation on this topic), the PID needs to be part of a namespace defined by a syntax that is controlled by an Authority. There should be an established tombstoning or equivalent procedure.

Examples

• GUPRIs. DOI, Handle, and ARK are schemata for globally unique, resolvable PIDs that are used in cross-community, multi-disciplinary ways, and are used and assigned across multiple projects.

• Persistent. Non-resolvable and often without a guarantee of global uniqueness, but shared across resources and communities, e.g., Reaction InChi, CAS registration numbers and EC numbers. Although they don't "click and resolve" without help, they are consistently used through a number of communities and therefore are in scope. Single-repository non-resolvable identifiers may also fit the scope of FAIRsharing as long as they are community relevant. Non-resolvable identifiers only ever minted for a single repository, e.g. UniProt Accession numbers, are relevant to an entire community as they are widely shared as cross-references and as a proxy for the proteins they describe. If these identifiers have a consistent and common usage within their community (irrespective of their origination just as identifiers for a single resource), then they are appropriate for inclusion within FAIRsharing.

• Globally unique and resolvable. The IVOA identifier is intended for a large, single-domain community of virtual observatories that use this identifier system for linking and identifying data. However it is not persistent, as stated in their documentation: "The IVOA Registry uses a unique identifier, the IVOID (Demleitner and Plante et al., 2016), as the primary key for its resource collection. By the above considerations, this IVOID is not suitable as a means of citation, because it is a technical identifier with no provisions for persistence."

• Globally unique and persistent. URNs are not required to be resolvable: “A Uniform Resource Name (URN) is a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that uses the urn scheme. URNs are globally unique persistent identifiers assigned within defined namespaces so they will be available for a long period of time, even after the resource which they identify ceases to exist or becomes unavailable.[1] URNs cannot be used to directly locate an item and need not be resolvable, as they are simply templates that another parser may use to find an item.”