Lawrey E1, Fluke E2, Babicci S1, Johnston J1, Hammerton M1, Lafond G1, Barlow M3, Martin J3
1Australian Institute Of Marine Science, Townsville, Australia, 2University of Tasmania, Hobart, Australia, 3Australian Research Data Commons, Canberra, Australia
Biography:
Dr Eric Lawrey joined the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) 18 years ago to develop the eAtlas, a repository for research data. He now leads the Knowledge Systems team, developing information systems that help researchers and reef managers access environmental research data. Eric has extensive experience with spatial data analysis and remote sensing, mapping the reefs of the Torres Strait, the Keppel Islands and the Coral Sea. Before AIMS he led a team developing new methods for software engineering. He studied Computer Systems Engineering and completed a PhD in wireless communications, modelling techniques now used in Wi-Fi and digital television.
Abstract:
Persistent identifiers (PIDs) connect datasets to the people, organisations, and research activities that produce them. These include Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for datasets, ORCIDs for researchers, Research Organization Registry (ROR) for institutions, and Research Activity Identifiers (RAiDs) for projects. The ISO 19115-3 metadata standard does not prescribe a specific way to encode these identifiers. The same identifier can be recorded in several valid locations, so without an agreed convention records cannot be read reliably. Our goal was for metadata from the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) and eAtlas to be read consistently by Research Data Australia.
To address this, we developed a Community Practice Guide for representing persistent identifiers in ISO 19115-3 records, using Australia's National Environmental Science Program Marine and Coastal Hub as a community of practice, and implemented it across the program's research projects and datasets. The conventions align with the intent of the standard as much as possible, documenting where each identifier is encoded and how to structure records so credit can be traced from datasets to contributors and funders.
With dozens of fields across multiple identifier types, ensuring records actually follow the conventions is hard, and omissions and encoding errors are easy to make and miss. We built iso-checker, a web application that validates records against the guide, reporting what is present, missing, or incorrectly encoded, resolving identifiers against external registries and working with GeoNetwork catalogues.
Together, the guide and the checker offer a transferable model for improving identifier adoption across repositories.
