Identify My Data - Overview

The ANDS Identify My Data service allows you to persistently identify your data. 

Research portals, analysis environments, and journals all increasingly need to refer to data.  Generally they refer to data with a normal URL link.  If the data moves location, or if anything mentioned in the URL changes, these published references to the data are broken.  And all the things that would build on this data are compromised, such as evidence-based policy, scholarly communication, verification of scientific methods, and educated public enquiry.

The ANDS Identify My Data service enables you to create a clickable reference to your dataset that will not be broken when the location of the dataset changes.  When people click on it, the ANDS service re-routes them to whatever location you nominate.  And you can update that location at anytime.

Some scenarios:

1. You have a dataset on your desktop that you intend to submit to a data centre in the future but you would like to refer to it right now in a journal article you are writing.  You use the Identify My Data services to allocate an identifier and include that “clickable” reference in your draft.  When your article is published, people start referring to your data in other articles using the persistent identifier.  When you move the dataset, you visit the ANDS service again to update the location details, and you don’t have to correct every reference to it in the literature. <more scenarios…>

The ANDS service allows you to:

Continuity of access to the data will be ensured if you maintain the details of the location up to date.

The service is designed to help ensure continuity of access to important research data.  The service is open to staff at universities, government agencies, publicly funded research organisations, museums, galleries, archives, libraries and any custodian of data relevant to research.  The service has an Australian focus but aims to assist the emergence of a global data commons.

When you use the ANDS service it is expected that you will:

1. be identifying only objects relevant to the research data commons
2. have the ability and commitment to maintain the currency of the location information associated with your identifier over the long term

People can use the ANDS service, but it is actually designed to be used by computers. The ANDS Machine2Machine Identifiers service provides web service interfaces to support automated system-to-system transactions. <more information…>

More information:

• How does it work?

• Machine2Machine Identifiers

• Getting an Account

• More Scenarios

• ANDS Identify My Data Policy Statement