Identifiers.org - BridgeDB - TogoID
Project Leads:
- Renato Juacaba Neto (EMBL-EBI)
- Vijay Venkatesh Subramoniam (EMBL-EBI)
- Nick Juty (University of Manchester)
Abstracts:
Identifiers.org, an Elixir Recommended Interoperability Service, is a metaresolver based on a registry of data namespaces which acts as its source of truth. These provide a resolution service for compact identifiers, as well as a harmonisation service for the compact identifier prefixes. The registry contains metadata on its namespace and resource entries which include valuable information on the data collections, such as ID regex patterns, online location where identified data objects can be resolved, and associated institutions. Through the continuous curation of the registry, identifiers.org URIs will always be resolvable, via our resolver, to provide a valid set of canonical URLs.
As part of ELIXIRs interoperability platform, identifiers.org seeks to facilitate interaction between not only ELIXIR resources, but also those used in a more global research context. Resources that take advantage of this community-driven registry and resolver benefit from harmonized references, through our prefixes, to identify objects with compact identifiers. This provides URLs that are permanently resolvable when linking to resources/records via our URIs. This project also tries to align itself with the EOSC directives and contribute to other European projects such as the FAIR-IMPACT.
The main goal of this project is to extend identifiers.org functionalities related to entry and namespace metadata, thus providing an additional and more central point of metadata acquisition for the services that use identifiers.org URIs. It is noteworthy that one does not have to be a resource provider to benefit from the services that identifiers.org provides.
We plan on prototyping an expansion of the metadata resolver for compact identifiers during the German BioHackathon. That way, it would match FAIRCORE4EOSC’s PID Meta Resolver metadata acquisition feature. For this, we intend to connect our metadata resolver with resources like ELIXIR’s BridgeDB and DBCLS’s TogoID. The current metadata resolver finds metadata for an entry by parsing contents of the entry’s resolved URL (acquired via the resolver) for structured data. Our proposal is to expand the metadata sources used by the resolver.
BridgeDB and TogoID are great candidates for acquiring related metadata. TogoID finds other data objects related to compact identifiers and these URLs can be exposed in the response of our metadata resolver. TogoID will be the main focus of our prototype during this hackathon. BridgeDB similarly shows related entries but would be limited to a few namespaces since the data types supported are limited. A final provider candidate we have at the moment is EBI Search that has retrievable metadata on life science resources. Our project would investigate concrete sources, such as these, and other providers, such as those part of de.NBI and ELIXIR Germany, to expose more information when our metadata resolver is queried. Additionally, we hope to expose ways that the community to cooperate to add additional metadata providers and map these to relevant namespaces.
Through these additions, identifiers.org will become more useful for its users as an interoperability service that allows easier metadata acquisition to references that use compact identifiers.