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Poster presented at the 4th Plenary meeting of the Research Data Alliance, September 22-25, 2014, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Internship sponsored by the National Science Foundation in conjunction with the RDA Persistent Identifiers Interest Group. Special thanks to Laure Haak, Laura Paglione, and Liz Krznarich from ORCID for their input and guidance.

Abstract

Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is an open, nonprofit, and community-driven effort to prevent name confusion in research and scholarly communities. ORCID Registry (developed by ORCID) distinguishes researchers and contributors by assigning unique researcher identifiers and linking research activities and outputs, including scholarly works, affiliations, and funding, to these identifiers. Since the registry service launched in October 2012, the number of ORCID identifiers has rapidly increased, and the registry has been continuously improved through the active use of ORCID API. This study aims to fill the gap between practical uses in and conceptual understandings of ORCID Registry. Since the registry was primarily developed with API uses, there was a lack of formal documentation describing the structure of ORCID Registry metadata. In this project, a structured description of the metadata utilized by users of ORCID is presented by using the Dublin Core Application Profile as a vehicle. The description is designed to draw a preliminary conceptual look of the registry and a productive discussion among the user communities. The ORCID Registry Metadata Application Profile (MAP) is developed based on ORCID Message 1.2_rc5 (i.e., XML schema release candidate 5 for ORCID Message 1.2). The documentation will help ORCID users to understand the structure and use of the registry. The MAP mainly describes purposes and scope, functional requirements, domain model, and metadata dictionary of the ORCID Registry. The formalized description also allows facilitating interoperability within the domain, supporting evolution of ORCID metadata, and encouraging alignment of practice.

Keywords

identifiers, ORCID, name authority, metadata

Date of this Version

9-23-2014

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