Types of PIDs for geoconnex redirects.

[dblodgett-usgs]

I'm thinking about adding some guidance for what kinds of PIDs we will encourage/support to have registered. Am working on a summary doc over here.

• Organizational monitoring or other information resources.
  • Provides stable identifiers for any organizations' resources.
  • Examples include: stream gages, wells, dam information, etc.
  • Redirect from geoconnex.us/{org-namespace}/{org-path} to {org-url}
  • Organizations own and maintain the PID list in this repo.
• Community reference locations.
  • Provides referenceable identifiers for shared surface water and groundwater locations.
  • Examples: NHD events, catchment indexes, groundwater wells.
  • Redirect from geoconnex.us/{theme-namespace}/{id} to {community-system-url}
  • A community actor or group would be required to curate these locations through some process managed outside this repository.
• Environmental feature of interest.
  • Provides referenceable identifiers for shared environmental features.
  • Examples: Reachcodes, comids, local aquifer ids.
  • Redirect from geoconnex.us/{authority-namespace}/{authority-path} to {community-canonical-url}
  • An authoritative community-oriented group would be expected to maintain these identifiers for the community.
• Established cataloging feature.
  • Provides referenceable identifiers for areal / place cataloging features.
  • Examples: hydrologic units, principle aquifers, counties, states.
  • Redirect from geoconnex.us/{authority-namespace}/{authority-path} to {community-canonical-url}
  • An authoritative community oriented group would be expected to maintain these for the community.

Questions:

1. Is this taxonomy and the descriptions above 1) coherent and 2) complete enough to be a V1 guide?
2. Where should this material be added to the repository?

[ksonda]

1. It's mostly coherent, although I think there might be some remaining confusion about organizational vs. community reference locations, especially when "wells" is an example in both. I think it would be useful to have a complete working example system of PIDs in each of the groups, and possible a visualization of how such items would link to each other.

2. I think the github wiki is fine. But we should also think about shopping presentations for conferences/meetings...maybe even [dread] an article?

[dblodgett-usgs]

Great point re: organizational resources vs community locations. I think the distinction between them is going to be clear when we have examples. The search of clear semantics and implementation patterns in this area is probably a fools errand. Each example is nuanced by business practice, history of bureaucracy, and history of engineering/scientific investigation on the ground. Given that, the diversity of ways that organizations information relate to some set of community-recognized reference locations is just going to be a mess we have to deal with case by case.

Regarding wells, an example is the National Groundwater Monitoring Network. It has a set of community reference locations that are wells. The contributor states and USGS have various web-resources that are about those reference locations. Both the NGWMN and the State/federal resources should have PIDs and would fall into the two distinct categories of organizational / community locations respectively.

I slightly modified the descriptions above and put them on the wiki. as well as creating stubs for more about each of these categories.