PIDA is a service providing unique persistent URLs (PURLs) for referencing digital assets on the web. Using our service will help you to ensure that your digital assets remain findable and can be accessed reliably by both humans and machines in the long term. PIDA is a service offered by the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) and the Institute for Materials Data Science and Informatics (IAS-9) at Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Why using PIDs from PIDA for your digital assets

Web addresses and the stability of established links can decay over time – for example, if a digital resource is moved to another location or when the domain name of an organization changes. This process is often known as link rot. When users try to access a decayed link, i.e. where the target has moved to a different location, they receive an ”404 not found” error instead of the desired web page. This problem can be prevented by using persistent identifiers – such as those provided by PIDA. These long-lasting references to a digital object – such as an article, dataset, video, person, or organization – will persistently identify that object on the internet, regardless of its actual location.

Using a PURL provided by PIDA ensures that:

• a resource can be reliably referenced for future access by humans and software
• links to resources do not break
• resources become more easily discoverable – for example, researchers, their affiliations, and their contributions
• resources are findable – one of the key elements in the FAIR principles of data management
• entities can be identified unambiguously – for example, authors with the same name can be distinguished from one another

How to manage PIDs in PIDA

Please use one of the following options to add or update your PIDs using our GitHub repository:

• Issue tracker: create a new issue (via request PURL issue template) describing the PURL you want to register.
• Fork PIDA repository: before using this method, please read the section Good practice when submitting requests via pull requests in the technical specifications page.

  1. Fork the PIDA repository.

  2. prepare your .htaccess file (considering the required information mentioned in the issue template).

  3. add or update your entries and commit your changes.

  4. submit a pull request for your changes. The maintainers of PIDA will check your pull request and merge it into the main branch so that you can see your purl in our repository.

Disclaimer: we do not assess the quality of the artefacts that our PIDs direct to, we only provide the PID.

License

The code is licensed under the MIT license. Copyright © 2022.

Acknowledgments

PIDA is a service of the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC), an incubator-platform of the Helmholtz Association within the framework of the Information and Data Science strategic initiative. It is developed, maintained and offered to you by the Institute for Materials Data Science and Informatics (IAS-9) of the Forschungszentrum Jülich