Default Conventions

Identifier Conventions

Introduction

Assigning citable, unique and persistent identifiers to information held within the GCIS greatly increases the transparency and traceability of that information as well as addressing a growing trend within the Federal research community: requiring researchers to formally cite the data and document the processes that led to a given research result (Mayernik, et al., 2012).

Title

• The Resources title (or name, if no title field) is modified to become the identifier. Spaces are replaced with “-”. All letters are lowercase.

• An older convention removed the words in, and, &, on, the, and of from titles. This is no longer preferred.

UUID

A UUID is generated for the resource and used as the identifier. Globally unique.

Number

The Resource type has an incrementing number as the identifier. Unique only for a given resource.

Ubiquitous Fields

Introduction

Some fields have the same value regardless of which resource they appear on. They are described here for simplicity.

Sort Key

• Items with a sort key tend to be displayed in line with others of that resource type. For example, chapters of a report or authors on an article.

• Sort key is handled in ascending order. A resource with sort key 10 will apear about one with 20, which will both be above one with sort key 100.

• Whenever external ordering is available, it should be respected.

• This value is not displayed to the end user.