[Esip-preserve] FW: Persistent Identifiers for Earth Science Provenance

[Raskin, Robert G]

http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/02/23/persistent-identifiers-for-earth-science-provenance/

In this week's ebiquity meeting (10:00am EDT Wed 2/25, ITE 325), Curt
Tilmes will talk on 'Persistent Identifiers for Earth Science
Provenance'.

Historically, published scientific research could include a description
of an experiment that an independent party could use to reproduce the
experiment with the same results, confirming the research. Modern
research in the field of earth science often depends on terrabytes of
data captured from remote sensing instruments, complex computer
algorithms that undergo numerous changes over the year. A single result
could be the result of the work of hundreds of individuals over
decades. The representation of the measurements, algorithms and all the
other artifacts of experimentation leading to that result becomes a
daunting problem. A key to handling this representation is a good
scheme for persisent identifiers.

Persistent identifiers seem like a simple problem. Just make a good URL
and don't change it [1]. This sounds good in theory, but is difficult
to maintain forever. Many other schemes have been proposed to attack
various aspects of the problem of identification, with various
advantages and disadvantages. I will introduce this topic and briefly
describe some of the concerns with using identifiers specifically in
the context described above, and some of the characteristics of various
identifier schemes.

The presentation will be streamed live via ustream.tv

References and some identifier schemes

[1] Cool URIs Don't Change
[2] Naming and Addressing: URIs, URLs, …
[3] Object Identifer (OID)
[4] The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) System
[5] Persistent Uniform Resource Locator
[6] A Universally Unique IDentifier (UUID) URN Namespace
[7] XRI (Extensible Resource Identifier)