GGBN Stable Identifiers
GGBN’s stable identifiers (ggbnIds) are automatically created and assigned after harvesting for each material entity, e.g. DNA sample, tissue sample, specimen etc. An identifier can change its status, but will remain a reliably stable source both for GGBN itself and other infrastructures. Depending on the user agent, each call is redirected to an rdf or http representation of the relevant object. The html landing pages include a complete relationship graph, e.g. the following one for https://id.ggbn.org/2ZBRRK
- Identifiers are assigned based on the occurrenceID/UnitGUID (if provided) or the triplet (UnitID, SourceID, SourceInstitutionID).
- Changes in the occurrenceID/UnitGUID will lead to new identifiers, redirects from old to new identifiers are possible and performed manually by the GGBN team in close collaboration with the member institution.
- The identifier status of any material entity that is no longer provided by the member institution will be changed to “DEPRECATED” and tombstone data will be published instead.
- The identifier status of any material entity that is marked as "gone" or "used up" will be changed to "ARCHIVED". Data of consumed material entities should still be provided to GGBN!
- Changes in the triplet with same occurrenceID will lead to a warning, but the existing identifier is kept.
- The status of identifiers assigned to entities that were published accidentally will be changed to “FAILED” and no data will be published at all.
- As encoding algorithm Crockford base32 is used.
- An overview about the different GGBN terms, including distinction between record and material entity can be found here: Definition of GGBN Terms
GGBN uses the identifier status suggested by DiSSCo (Addink, W. et al., 2023. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e107168) with small adjustments:
Status | Remarks | Example |
---|---|---|
ACTIVE | Material entity data available in portal, physical resource still exists | https://id.ggbn.org/2ZBR81 |
ARCHIVED | Material entity data available in portal, physical resource gone (disposition=consumed), record kept for historical reasons | https://id.ggbn.org/35WXZ2 |
DEPRECATED | Material entity data removed by provider, GGBN shows tombstone data | https://id.ggbn.org/35YPPV |
FAILED | Data accidentally published and later removed by provider; GGBN shows only message and no data | |
INACTIVE | Material entity data excluded from portal, entity from non GGBN member or non core GGBN member, that has been associated to a GGBN record previously, but is no longer related to any GGBN record | https://id.ggbn.org/30X3PY |
DRAFT | Stable identifier assigned, material entity data not fully processed yet |