It was recommended that globally unique values for identifier should be specified way back with #69 and the guidance was updated to make this a recommendation (using a URL) with the update to v1.1, but it was not a strict requirement. After several years of this metadata making its way across the internet ecosystem it's now more clear than ever that this needs to transition to a hard requirement. The case for this was already made pretty sufficiently within #69. This issue is meant to lead both to final guidance on that as a hard requirement, but also to more immediately develop a migration pathway to transition current non-global values for identifier to proper URLs.
One migration option may be to define a convention where a unique ID for each agency is paired with the non-global identifier for the dataset and then have that appended to the end of a URL, potentially using a similar approach as W3ID to help maintain persistence.
For instance, if GSA has a metadata entry with a non global identifier like GSA-2016-01-22-01 then that could be represented as a more global URI like dcat-us:federal/gsa/GSA-2016-01-22-01 but ultimately it would appended on to a URL for a final value of something like https://id.data.gov/dcat-us/federal/gsa/GSA-2016-01-22-01. We'd also need to consider URL encoding as part of this transformation since there aren't any restrictions on the current values.
It was recommended that globally unique values for
identifiershould be specified way back with #69 and the guidance was updated to make this a recommendation (using a URL) with the update to v1.1, but it was not a strict requirement. After several years of this metadata making its way across the internet ecosystem it's now more clear than ever that this needs to transition to a hard requirement. The case for this was already made pretty sufficiently within #69. This issue is meant to lead both to final guidance on that as a hard requirement, but also to more immediately develop a migration pathway to transition current non-global values foridentifierto proper URLs.One migration option may be to define a convention where a unique ID for each agency is paired with the non-global
identifierfor the dataset and then have that appended to the end of a URL, potentially using a similar approach as W3ID to help maintain persistence.For instance, if GSA has a metadata entry with a non global identifier like
GSA-2016-01-22-01then that could be represented as a more global URI likedcat-us:federal/gsa/GSA-2016-01-22-01but ultimately it would appended on to a URL for a final value of something likehttps://id.data.gov/dcat-us/federal/gsa/GSA-2016-01-22-01. We'd also need to consider URL encoding as part of this transformation since there aren't any restrictions on the current values.