Skip to content

Opacity of eventIDs #15

Description

@CherineJ

Creating reasonable eventIDs remains a challenge in every data set. So far, we built all eventIDs (and other IDs accordingly) by combining information from different fields in the data that uniquely describe the event (eg., year-block-treatment-plot). By this, the ID directly gives information about the event itself and is relatively human readable.

However, some research on persistent identifiers brought me to a GBIF guide ("A Beginner’s Guide to
Persistent Identifiers"
) that states:

"It is important to understand that Persistent Identifiers are intended for computers to
communicate with other computers. As such, they should be invisible to most users. In
fact one of the important qualities of a good Persistent Identifier is opacity. That is, the
identifier itself should not contain any readily identifiable information."

We need to check again though, whether this only applies to PIDs of the data set level or also to the record level.

As our current ID structure is not compliant with that, we would then also need to check whether we want/have to change that in the future.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    hurdleHurdles/problems we encounter throughout the workflow.

    Type

    No type

    Fields

    No fields configured for issues without a type.

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions