Maintaining and Implementing PID Metadata - responsibilities of appropriate stakeholders in data management

At the Helmholtz Association, we strive to establish a well-formed harmonized data space, connecting information across distributed data infrastructures. This requires standardizing the description of data sets with suitable metadata to achieve interoperability and machine actionability.

One way to make connections between datasets and to avoid redundancy in metadata is the consistent use of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). A lot of information within the metadata such as people, organizations, projects, laboratories, repositories, publications, vocabularies, samples, instruments, licenses, and methods should be commonly referenced by PIDs, but not for all of these agreed identifiers exist yet.

Typically, researchers who are publishing datasets are also tasked with compiling the metadata for those datasets. However, researchers are usually not in charge of a lot of information that should be part of the documentation of a dataset. They often have to rely on information they receive from other sources, e.g. technicians, responsible for the measuring devices or librarians, who are experts in assigning licenses. Starting from PID Systems ROR, ORCID, IGSN, PIDInst, DataCiteDOI and CrossRef DOI we suggest to share the load, and assign certain expert stakeholder groups responsibility to maintain specific information and to conduct certain tasks within the research data management (RDM) workflow.

The conclusions from this process do not only affect the implementation of PID metadata, but may also be used for the harmonization of vocabularies, digital objects, interfaces, licenses, quality flags and others, in order to connect our global data systems, to redefine stakeholder responsibility and to ultimately reach the data space.