Meeting: Identifying, understanding, and overcoming technical issues in identifier systems, Oracle, Arizona, winter 2015-16

University Of Arizona, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

A growing awareness of the need for permanent, globally unique identifiers for both physical specimens and digital data has led to the development of new systems for minting, tracking, resolving, and querying identifiers. While work has been published on identifier type characteristics and best practices for their application, there has been little empirical research on the functionality of identifiers or the services that support them, especially on elements of the data lifecycle that occur before publication. Practitioners working with identifiers are aware of the technical and social issues and limitations in the application and use of identifier systems. Yet, there is limited understanding of whether and how systems will scale to support very large, multidisciplinary datasets, or time to imagine and address next generation challenges. This award will support a meeting to bring together experienced identifier practitioners for facilitated activities to document the current state of the field, identify and elucidate the technical issues, and propose solutions. This workshop will focus on identifier solutions to big, interdisciplinary data. Multi-disciplinary participants will be tasked with imagining, discussing, proposing, and hacking next generation solutions for data identifiers. In addition, a portion of the workshop will serve as a hackathon, so that participants have opportunities to develop some initial implementations. This meeting will seek synergy across disciplines by inviting diverse participants from multiple domains who might not otherwise work together, opening potential for new, cross-community collaborations. A meeting report and peer reviewed articles will be written on the workshop outcomes, and any software produced during the hackathon activities will be available for public access through Github. Inclusion of early career scientists will provide training and promote the adoption of new solutions and technologies, and care will be taken to ensure participation by under-represented groups.