[Esip-preserve] Stewardship Best Practices - Identifiers

[Mark A. Parsons]

Bruce,

I don't believe anyone denies your fundamental conclusions. The question is what are their implications, especially in regards to the conclusions of the paper.

I would suggest that our final conclusion is that there is currently no fully robust and truly unique identification scheme, but there are some current practices that can imperfectly aid in ensuring scientific reproducibility. We suggest what may be seen as interim best practices that address three of our four use cases, notably data citation. Data Managers should adopt these practices while adhering to other best practices of data stewardship and being mindful of further research addressing mechanisms to trace and ensure data authenticity.

To make this conclusion, we need to beef up the discussion of use case 4 on scientific uniqueness, by including some of what you have been describing (perhaps with a reference to Barkstrom (in prep.)). We may also want to add an assessment the Universal Numeric Fingerprint to our list.

I think if we make those changes, the rest of paper stands (after some reorganization and editing Ruth and I have discussed).

Cheers,

-m. 

p.s. I was tickled that you picked my home town (Ithaca) and just outside my other childhood home (Mt. Shasta) for your data examples.


On 7 Oct 2010, at 12:35 PM, Bruce Barkstrom wrote:

> c.  As an interim approach to identifiers, I think it would be straightforward to
> use the current naming conventions and hook them up to some of the identifier
> schemas identified in the paper.  DOI's that resolve to file or collection names
> are probably as good as anything else if we're looking for simple identification.
> However, I do not think this kind of approach should be sold as a method of
> concocting permanent, unique identifiers.  At best, scientifically identical data
> collections form an equivalence class - with no special status for one unique
> member of the class.