Dictionary domainTrack B
The persistent identifier ecosystem
ORCID, ROR, RAiD, IGSN, PIDINST, DOIs — the PID landscape.
For implementers
Operational deployment checklist for The persistent identifier ecosystem: prerequisites, five deploy steps, integration notes for Pure, Symplectic Elements, Worktribe, DSpace, and more, plus the pitfalls that recur in the field.
Terms in this domain
44 terms
Identifier crosswalk
A mapping or correspondence table between identifiers in different schemes that refer to the same real-world entity, allowing a system holding one scheme's identifier to find the equivalent identifier in another scheme.
DOI tombstone
A tombstone page served at the resolved URL of a DOI after the underlying resource has been withdrawn, providing withdrawal information and metadata while ensuring the DOI itself continues to resolve.
DOI suffix
The portion of a DOI after the first forward slash, assigned by the registrant within their issued DOI prefix, identifying the specific object; can contain any Unicode characters with the case-insensitivity rule applied during comparison.
DOI prefix
The leading portion of a DOI before the first forward slash, of the form 10.NNNN where 10 is the directory indicator for DOI under the Handle System and NNNN is a numeric (or alphanumeric) string assigned by the DOI Registration Agency to a specific registrant.
Tombstone page
A landing page served at a persistent identifier's resolved URL after the underlying resource has been withdrawn, retracted, or made permanently unavailable, providing metadata describing the former resource, the reason for its absence, and (where applicable) a successor identifier.
Identifier syntax
The formal grammar that constrains the textual form of identifiers in a given scheme — what character sets, lengths, prefixes, separators, and check digits are allowed — typically expressed as a regular expression or BNF grammar in the scheme's specification.
Identifier scheme
A named, formally-defined system for constructing, issuing, and resolving identifiers, typically defined by a syntax, an authority structure (who can mint), a metadata schema, and a resolution policy.
PID resolution
The process by which a persistent identifier is looked up through its scheme's resolution infrastructure and returned either as an HTTP redirect to the current resource location or as metadata about the resource, depending on the request and the scheme's policy.
PID minting
The act of generating a new persistent identifier in a registered scheme and registering it, with associated metadata, at the appropriate PID provider so that it becomes resolvable and discoverable.
PID metadata
The descriptive metadata registered with a PID provider at the time of identifier minting, and updated thereafter, that describes the identified entity — its title, creators, dates, types, related identifiers, and so on — and that is exposed by the provider's APIs alongside the identifier itself.
Funder ID
An identifier from the Crossref Funder Registry (formerly FundRef), a curated, open registry of funder names and identifiers used by publishers to tag deposited works with the funders that supported them.
Curated org record (ROR)
An entry in the ROR registry that has been reviewed and approved by ROR curators against the published inclusion criteria, carrying a stable ROR ID and metadata including names, types, country, geographic location, parent/child/related/successor/predecessor relationships, and crosswalks.
ROR Curation
The community-driven process by which the Research Organization Registry receives, reviews, and acts on requests to add new organisations, update existing records, merge duplicates, or split records, governed by a published curation policy and managed by ROR's curation team.
PID graph
A graph data structure in which persistent identifiers (ORCID iDs, DOIs, ROR IDs, RAiDs, IGSNs, etc.) are nodes and the metadata relationships among them (creator-of, affiliated-with, funded-by, derived-from) are edges, allowing federated queries across multiple PID-provider registries.
PID consortium
A grouping of PID-provider member organisations, typically at national or regional scale, formed to share infrastructure, contracts, and support around one or more persistent identifier schemes such as DOI, ORCID, or ROR.
PID provider
An organisation that issues persistent identifiers from one or more PID schemes, operates (or contracts) the resolution infrastructure for those identifiers, and makes long-term commitments about the maintenance of the identifiers and their metadata.
Resolution service
A networked service that, given a persistent identifier, returns the current location of the named resource (typically by HTTP redirect) or returns its metadata, allowing the identifier itself to remain stable while the resource's location changes.
Persistent URL
An HTTP(S) URL that an issuing organisation commits to maintain unchanged over time so that links continue to resolve correctly even as the underlying resource is moved, renamed, or migrated between systems.
w3id.org PURL
A persistent URL hosted on the w3id.org domain by the W3C Permanent Identifier Community Group, providing a community-maintained redirect under https://w3id.org/<namespace> to ontologies, vocabularies, and standards documents that may move between hosting providers over time.
PURL
Persistent Uniform Resource Locator, a URL maintained by a PURL service that redirects (typically via HTTP 302) to the current location of the named resource, allowing the persistent URL to remain stable as the underlying resource location changes.
URN
Uniform Resource Name (RFC 8141), a URI of the form urn:NID:NSS where NID is a registered Namespace Identifier and NSS is the namespace-specific string, intended to denote a resource persistently and independently of any particular resolution mechanism.
Handle
An identifier in the CNRI Handle System (RFC 3650-3652), of the form Prefix/Suffix (e.g. 20.500.12345/abcd), resolved by a distributed system of Handle servers that map the identifier to one or more current URLs or other typed data values.
ARK inflection rules
A convention of the ARK identifier scheme whereby appending a single '?' to an ARK URL yields the object's descriptive metadata and appending '??' yields a 'commitment statement' describing the issuing institution's persistence policy for that ARK.
ARK
Archival Resource Key, a persistent identifier scheme for information objects of any type, in the form ark:/NAAN/Name[Qualifier], where NAAN is a Name Assigning Authority Number and Name is the local identifier; resolvable through any cooperating ARK resolver.
UUID
Universally Unique Identifier (RFC 4122 / ISO/IEC 9834-8), a 128-bit value rendered as 32 hexadecimal digits in 8-4-4-4-12 grouping, generated such that the probability of collision across independent generators is negligible.
GUID
Globally Unique Identifier, a generic term for an identifier that is intended to be unique across all systems and time, most commonly implemented as a 128-bit UUID but used informally for any opaque, globally scoped identifier.
PIDINST
A persistent identifier for a research instrument, minted under a DataCite DOI or Handle, conforming to the PIDINST metadata schema developed by an RDA Working Group, that enables citation of and provenance back to the instrument that produced data.
IGSN
International Geo Sample Number, a globally unique persistent identifier for physical samples (geological, environmental, biological) that supports tracking and citation of the sample through subsequent analyses, publications, and derived data.
RAiD
Research Activity Identifier, an ISO-standardised persistent identifier (ISO 23527) for a research project or activity, providing a stable handle around which related people, organisations, outputs, instruments, and funding can be linked over the activity's lifetime.
DataCite consortium
A national or regional grouping of DataCite member organisations led by a 'Consortium Lead' that holds the master agreement with DataCite, allowing member institutions to mint DOIs under a shared fee structure and shared support model.
DataCite DOI
A DOI registered through DataCite, the DOI Registration Agency that serves research data, software, samples, dissertations, instruments, and other non-article research outputs, accompanied by metadata in the DataCite Metadata Schema.
Crossref DOI
A DOI registered through Crossref, the DOI Registration Agency for scholarly publications (journals, books, conference proceedings, preprints, peer reviews, grants), accompanied by metadata deposited in Crossref's XML schema.
DOI
Digital Object Identifier (ISO 26324), a persistent identifier for an entity (typically a research output) consisting of a prefix assigned to a registrant by a DOI Registration Agency and a suffix assigned by the registrant, resolvable as an HTTPS URI under https://doi.org/.
ISNI
International Standard Name Identifier (ISO 27729), a 16-digit identifier for the public identity of a person or organisation involved in the creation, production, management, or distribution of content, administered by the ISNI International Agency.
GRID
Global Research Identifier Database, a legacy identifier and registry of research organisations originally operated by Digital Science, frozen to new records in 2021 and superseded by ROR, which seeded its registry from a deduplicated GRID snapshot.
ROR ID
A persistent identifier for research organisations issued by the Research Organization Registry (ROR), expressed as an HTTPS URI of the form https://ror.org/0xxxxxxxx where the final nine-character path component is a base32-encoded random value with a check digit.
ORCID education
An affiliation item in an ORCID record asserting that the iD holder studied at a named organisation, including degree or qualification, department, start and end dates, and the organisation's disambiguated identifier.
ORCID employment
An affiliation item in an ORCID record asserting that the iD holder is or was employed by a named organisation, with start date, optional end date, department, role title, and the organisation's disambiguated identifier (typically a ROR ID).
ORCID work assertion
A claim, recorded in an ORCID record, that a particular research output (journal article, book chapter, dataset, software, etc.) is associated with the iD holder, with metadata fields including title, type, publication year, external identifiers (DOI, ISBN, PMID), and contributor role.
ORCID record permissions
The three-level visibility setting attached to each item in an ORCID record — public, trusted parties only (limited), or private — which the record holder applies individually to names, employments, works, fundings, and other assertions.
ORCID consortium
A national or regional grouping of ORCID member organisations that share a single membership fee structure and a lead organisation, in order to coordinate ORCID adoption, training, and policy advocacy within a country or region.
ORCID API
The two-tier REST application programming interface (Public API and Member API) operated by ORCID that allows systems to read public ORCID record data and, with researcher authorisation, to read restricted data or write trusted-party assertions to records.
ORCID record
The structured profile maintained at orcid.org for an individual ORCID iD, containing assertions about the person's names, employments, educations, funding, works, peer reviews, and service activities, each with a visibility setting and a source attribution.
ORCID iD
A 16-digit persistent identifier, expressed as four hyphen-separated blocks (e.g. 0000-0002-1825-0097) and resolvable as an HTTPS URI under https://orcid.org/, that uniquely identifies an individual researcher across publications, datasets, grants, employments, and peer-review activity.
