PID Kernel Information Profile Management WG

Webinar - Connecting Data, Institutions and People: FAIR Digital Objects, RDA outputs and the design of the DiSSCo Research Infrastructure - 18 March 2021

Please note that this RDA group space contains information about two consecutive RDA Working Groups:

• the PID Kernel Information WG, which started in March 2017 and completed in July 2019, has produced an endorsed Recommendation, which you can find here. After its completion, the PID Kernel Information WG decided to continue work in a separate group, the PID Kernel Information Profile Management WG.
• the PID Kernel Information Profile Management WG (active from July 2019 - January 2021). This group was withdrawn before producing its Recommendation.

This space contains the material from both WGs.

The PID Kernel Information WG produced a recommendation that contains i) guiding principles for identifying information appropriate as PID Kernel Information, ii) an exemplar PID Kernel Information profile, iii) several use cases, and iv) architectural considerations. PID Kernel Information is defined as the set of attributes stored within a PID record. It supports smart programmatic decisions that can be accomplished through inspection of the PID record alone.

At the RDA P13 PID Kernel Information WG session, attendees expressed enthusiasm over the PID KI work.  While the WG feels that the exemplar profile reflects a consensus decision while at the same time satisfying the guiding principles, it does not preclude other profiles.  But a global technology, such as the PID KI intends to be, that is without considered organizational governance or management will never be adopted except in highly leading edge (aka research) settings.    

Thus the PID KI WG agreed at the conclusion of the P13 session that there was need to examine the governance and management of some small number of globally relevant PID KI profiles.   Without further guidance on how to manage profiles, there is the risk of wide-scale proliferation of overlapping or incompatible profiles, which could significantly hamper long-term realization of coherent middleware that supports Kernel Information.  As the PID KI depends on a type profile to be interpretable, it requires the existence of a Data Type Registry to store the type definition of the PID KI.  In fact, both PID KI and DTR are part of the same digital object ecosystem.  Thus the issue of governance must be coordinated with the DTR#3 group.   A follow-on WG additionally presents an opportunity to further define the boundary conditions for such middleware and foster alignment across disciplines and regions.

The WG lives in the context of
-    Multiple use cases from disciplinary adoption and project work
-    Relevant work inside RDA (other WG/IG) and outside RDA (W3C PROV, SemWeb/LD in general)

The group's initial (phase #1) output is an RDA Recommendation, which is available here: https://www.rd-alliance.org/group/pid-kernel-information-wg/outcomes/recommendation-pid-kernel-information