Partially Attended

an irregularly updated blog by Ian Mulvany

A new new way to make biological data more easily citable

Wed May 16, 2018

158 Words

Working under Force11 the California digital library and the EBI have made progress on making identifiers to data held in biological data repositories more easily resolvable. The have done this by setting up infrastructure and standards to support creating globally unique prefixes for the data repositories involved. You can see some examples in this table: Table 2: Examples of persistent, citable URLs for a single accession (NCBI Taxon 9606), with default and specified providers.

You can read the paper here: Uniform resolution of compact identifiers for biomedical data | Scientific Data.

I love seeing work like this coming out, incremental progress towards a better shared future for our data infrastructures. This is the kind of work that requires collaboration, careful thinking and coordination across multiple organisations. This is the kind of work that really needs community involvement, but hopefully will be more robust as a result in contrast to single shot solutions well done to the teams involved.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License