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Identifier Initiatives

Let's face it; if you're an identifier geek, you probably became one out of sheer frustration with not being able to do something a lot more interesting -- like data integration, not because you love identifiers. In the life sciences there are many dozens of thought leaders actively working to improve the identifiers landscape; however, things are moving fast it is difficult to stay abreast of the overlaps/complementarity. Not everyone can attend every meeting or every working group, nor should they need to.

Although improved dissemination of our collective products doesn't ensure harmony or eliminate duplicated efforts, it is a step in the right direction. All reasonable contributions of new content are welcome here, provided it is done by someone who has at least skimmed the existing content.

The purpose of this repo is limited to gathering information for consumption by a technical audience. That is admittedly narrow, but existing organizations doing the actual work / work products are the ones better suited to hosting it.

This repo aims to house the following information:

1) What are the (active) working groups trying to improve the web-based identifier landscape

2) Which individuals are participating in these groups

3) What they're doing that is of cross-cutting relevance in this landscape

  • tooling
  • publications
  • other standards / guidance
  • meetings/hackathons
  • surveys
  • use cases

4) Known adoption/demonstration of the above products

6) Past identifier-based efforts/products

  • background reading (specifically what worked, what didn't, why)
  • updates to existing tooling (eg. PURL looks like it isn't long for this world)

7) Wish lists / help wanted / gaps analysis

  • Use issue tracker to ask your fellow id geeks a question about an identifiers-based problem you're trying to solve

If a single source of the above information already exists somewhere, that would be welcome news indeed! If you know of such an effort, propose a change to this document or Skype me at mcmurry.julie to let me know. Otherwise, let's just get it done.

The "identifiers/initiatives" github repo is one of the simplest approaches that could possibly work for information-gathering because the following features are baked into GitHub for free:

  • "drive-by" contributions by anyone withoug even leaving the browser
  • permissioning / authentication
  • user-driven notification settings that integrate with email
  • @mentions of specific team members or anyone on GitHub
  • issue tracker
  • more transparent attribution for individual contributors of content

The organization "github.com/identifiers" is deliberately generic in order to foster broad participation without getting coopted for a single cause. If we find that we gather so much information that it overwhelms even the identifier devotees, we could later explore some ways of structuring it more meaningfully or in a way that is is more easily consumed (eg. using YAML->GitHub pages as recently done for OBO foundry website). For now, let's take an agile approach and see how it develops with the minimum effort we can muster.

To serve the above purpose, content here should remain high level, with pointers elsewhere for details.

What this repo is not:

  1. A place for code
  2. A place to house orphaned projects that don't fit anywhere
  3. Primarily a debate forum