Thanks @sharif.islam for the responses. Based on that extra background, I’ll leave a few points responding to the questions up top based on our experience with the Movebank platform for animal-borne sensor data, and hopes for DES infrastructure.
Question 1 (core capabilities): In our case, we are looking for globally unique, persistent animal identifiers that users can assign to their data within our platform that can also be used within other platforms to allow archiving of diverse life history data across multiple existing relevant repositories. Requirements for our use case are
- global solutions: we are based within the EU but host data from around the world and assist in meeting data archiving requirements for multiple countries, so solutions specific to the EU or US are not sufficient
- solutions relevant to digital data with no associated physical museum specimen, which account for a growing proportion of biodiversity data: for more see Kays et al. 2020, “Born-digital biodiversity data: Millions and billions”
Question 2 (pain points): I imagine that a challenge to implementing DES infrastructure is how to verify true uniqueness of PIDs, i.e., ensuring that the same individuals and data are not registered multiple times: If a researcher deposits different data relating to the same animals within and across multiple repositories, who is responsible for registering the PID and ensuring the same PIDs are used in all relevant repositories and datasets? As third parties harvest, revise, and aggregate the data, how do we ensure that they do not register additional PIDs for the same individuals?
Questions 3-4 (adoption by existing initiatives): In the short and medium term, we would need a low-effort solution that allows us to maintain our existing data infrastructure, allowing users to optionally store globally recognizable animal PIDs within our database. We would adopt our existing APIs so that this data can be harvested and archived with relevant data, and as designated funding for further development becomes available, could implement additional integrations to improve data FAIRness. The future reliance on another party (e.g., GBIF) to obtain PIDs on our behalf might be possible, but would apply to a limited subset of the data we store, and I am not sure how the other party would ensure PID uniqueness as described above.
Is there a place to provide specific user stories or offer to serve as early adopters as part of this consultation?