Same Place, Different Name: The Case for Research Site Identifiers

At the Research Data Alliance Plenary 5, we reported on our initial assessment of the cyberinfrastructure necessary to connect data collection site information to the datasets derived from those observations. Our use case focused on the Barrow Area Information Database (BAID) and datasets derived fr...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Collins, Julia, Gaylord, Allison G.
Format: Still Image
Language:English
Published: Zenodo 2016
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2564110
https://zenodo.org/record/2564110
Description
Summary:At the Research Data Alliance Plenary 5, we reported on our initial assessment of the cyberinfrastructure necessary to connect data collection site information to the datasets derived from those observations. Our use case focused on the Barrow Area Information Database (BAID) and datasets derived from fieldwork in the Barrow, Alaska (USA) area. BAID serves as a repository for metadata describing both historical and contemporary Arctic field research sites. Our earlier work focused on the use of the funding agency project identifier to bridge from BAID to an archived dataset. However, a single funded project often results in more than one dataset, and field projects may record measurements at more than one physical site and package those observations into a single dataset. Furthermore, the names used by BAID for the data collection sites were very different from those the Project Investigators included in the metadata for their research outputs. We clearly needed a consistent way to identify the physical data collection site in both the BAID repository and the metadata of related datasets. We are currently using geohashes to uniquely identify physical research sites, and are generating examples of ISO 19115-compliant metadata that incorporate the geohash as a unique site identifier.