Imperial College London

Henry Rzepa

This is sent from the Pidapalooza event in Reykjavik, Iceland, and is a
short collection of notable things I learnt or which attracted my
attention.

Firstly, what IS **PIDapalooza**\[cite\]10.5438/11.0001\[/cite\]? Well,
it's all about persistent identifiers, but don't let that put you off!
Another way of putting it is that it's a way of finding things
scientific on the Web. Not just publications, but conferences, social
media, teaching, research datasets, infrastructure, grants,
organizations, instruments, scientific objects and samples and no doubt
much more. These (will) live in an inter-connected eco-system, and so
the idea goes, will become an integral part of how a scientist
accumulates and disseminates information nowadays. Yes, the conference
itself has its own PID:
[10.5438/11.0001](http://doi.org/10.5438/11.0001)  and the individual
talks will also appear as both a collection and with their own  PID in
the near future.

1.  The first example comes from WikiData, a collection of carefully
    curated data, from which can be dynamically assembled say a periodic
    table of the elements. All the data here is included from other
    objects, and everything is referenced by its PID. Since it's all
    assembled from data, if say the name of element 118 is assigned,
    then it will automatically be absorbed into this presentation.

    ::: {.iframe src="https://tools.wmflabs.org/ptable/"}
    :::
2.  This next example proved highly contentious, but is included here
    anyway. It is templated PIDs, as in
    <http://doi.org/10.5446/12780#t=00:20.00:27> which allows navigation
    to a particular part of an object referenced by the PID. In this
    case a time code for a movie, but it might be say an active site in
    a protein, or a key atom or group in a molecular complex for
    example.  This might never happen (for reasons only the computer
    scientists currently understand!) but it does show one way in which
    the humble DOI might evolve.
3.  [http://typeregistry.org](http://typeregistry.org/) exists for
    registering data types. It has almost no chemistry at the moment,
    but perhaps it should have! 
4.  There was a great deal about  ORCIDs, and the ways in which uses of
    this particular  PID are evolving.  For example, the next big effort
    is to use the ORCID system for organisations.  You will find my
    ORCID at the top of this post.
5.  PIDs are also being mooted for instruments. The idea is that
    instrumental capabilities, settings, calibration etc are often an
    integral part of the data acquisition for a project. So if data is
    generated using such a device, why not quote its  PID in any derived
    article so that others can more easily replicate a particular
    experiment in their own laboratory.
6.  A quote by one of the speakers was attributed to Bill Gates around
    1997 "We need  banking. We don't need banks anymore" (think how this
    might apply to 2016. Was he correct?).  This was followed by straw
    men such as: "We need publications. We don't need publishers
    anymore". Or "We need archiving. We don't need libraries anymore".
    Just like Gates' own quote, the reality is of course far more
    complex.
7.  And PID fatigue;  I hope you are not getting too much of that at the
    moment.

There are lots more I have learnt which I need to fix/enhance/address in
our own experiments in the use of PIDs in chemistry, so I have better
get on with it now!

::: {.wp_orcid_field}
[https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390){target="_blank"
rel="author"}
:::


This is sent from the Pidapalooza event in Reykjavik, Iceland, and is a short collection of notable things I learnt or which attracted my attention. Firstly, what IS
<strong>
 PIDapalooza
</strong>
[cite]10.5438/11.0001[/cite]? Well, it’s all about persistent identifiers, but don’t let that put you off! Another way of putting it is that it’s a way of finding things scientific on the Web.

Publicaciones de Rogue Scholar

Pidapalooza!