Identifiers for Datasets

Overview

The purpose of this document is to describe the behavior of DataONE indexers when encountering identifiers in SO:Dataset [3] instances.

In the context of DataONE, a dataset has multiple components. Each component version is preserved and each component version has a persistent, globally unique identifier (PID). Each component may also be assigned a globally unique identifier that always resolves to the most recent version of a component (SeriesID or SID). That context is used in this document.

id and identifier

The @id property in JSON-LD [1] identifies a node in the RDF graph, and must be an IRI [2]. The SO:identifier is an optional property of a node that may or may not be a URI, and may or may not be the same as the @id for the node.

Ideally, the @id and the SO:identifier would have the same value though this if often not the case for datasets.

Identifier Conflation

The string “978-1-5387-1847-6” is an identifier, in this case an ISBN. A number of services are available to provide more information about the subject of the identifier. For example, `ISBN Search`_ is a lookup service that provides a HTML view of the results. Goole provides a `Books API`_ that returns structured data, though requires anuthentication to use, for example:

curl "https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes?key=${GAPIKEY}&q=isbn:9781538718476"

{
  "kind": "books#volumes",
  "totalItems": 1,
  "items": [
   {
    "kind": "books#volume",
    "id": "SyqzDwAAQBAJ",
    "etag": "q7NUsBTwiu8",
    "selfLink": "https://www.googleapis.com/books/v1/volumes/SyqzDwAAQBAJ",
...

Note that the canonical form of the identifier is "``9781538718476``", the commonly
used human readable form is "``978-1-5387-1847-6``", and a resolvable form that
varies with the resolving service such as the aforementioned Google Books API.

Persistence

There is no notion of immutability in schema.org.

Foototes

[1]	IRIs are a fundamental concept of Linked Data, for nodes to be truly linked, dereferencing the identifier should result in a representation of that node. https://www.w3.org/TR/json-ld/#node-identifiers

[2]	An IRI (Internationalized Resource Identifier) is a string that conforms to the syntax defined in RFC 3987

[3]	https://schema.org/Dataset

[4]	http://schema.org/docs/datamodel.html#identifierBg

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