We are thrilled to announce that Metadata Game Changers is partnering with Openscapes, housed at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis on a new NASA-funded, three year project!

We just finished 24 hours of PIDapalooza  last week with talks and demos and an amazing amount of information presented by PID experts and users all over the world. It was a truly international meeting happening all over the world with presentations and discussions in many languages.

In honor of PIDapalooza 2021 and 25 hours of Persistent Identifier discussion happening today, we thought a post celebrating the power of PIDs for increasing connectivity and how to measure that connectivity is in order. Let’s party on 🥳 Discovery Before Conectivity (BC) : For many years we have thought about discovery in terms of web portals with text search boxes, maps, timelines, facets, or some other kind of interface.

Metadata schema evolution reflects the progression of needs, ideas, and practices of the community that creates and uses the metadata. Version 2.0 of the DataCite Metadata Schema was released ten years ago. During this time, the schema has evolved considerably, adding capabilities and supporting many new use cases.

The road to complete and consistent metadata can be long and arduous – digging through piles of metadata and other kinds of data to find small gems of information that can be added to metadata records, contacting recalcitrant researchers to fill in blanks, slowly building content across a collection… Does it really need to be that hard?

Looking for New Year’s metadata resolutions? How about: Stop using sentences that include the words “minimum metadata” without specifying a use case. Sentences that include the words “minimum metadata” come up frequently in metadata discussions, usually in the context of what a data provider wants to provide or, even more common, in the context of what should be expected of them.

Martin Fenner from DataCite recently described the benefits of some standardization of sources for vocabularies used for three DataCite metadata elements: language, rights, and subjects. All of these elements: can play important roles in the dataset discovery and selection processes at DataCite are implemented using shared vocabularies that are identified by associated Scheme elements, e.g. subjectScheme, and are optional.

Last October I pulled together a list of organization names that occur multiple times in the ROR database. These non-unique organization names represent the most extreme case of the essential problem that RORs are trying to address, ambiguous affiliations.

Version 4.3 of the DataCite Metadata Schema released during August, 2019 included (among other things), the capability to provide persistent identifiers for affiliated organizations in the metadata (Dasler and deSmaele, Identify your affiliation with Metadata Schema 4.3, 2019). This capability builds on the work and enthusiasm generated by the ROR Community that has championed the concept of open organization identifiers for several years

The scholarly communications and open science communities are getting excited about the benefits of metadata that includes persistent identifiers for organizations. Now that an open registry of organizational identifiers exists, the community is facing two adoption challenges: 1) evolving metadata dialects to include identifiers and 2) implementing them in existing and future metadata.

A quick post about non-unique ROR Organization names. Many groups are interested in augmenting their affiliation metadata with RORs and it seems that a list of organization names is the right input to that process... Alas, we know that affiliations are a swamp filled with gotcha's. It turns out that an unexpected (really?) number of organization names resolve to multiple RORs. Actually, almost 800 of them!