PIDapalooza 2021

In order to fully embrace ROR, we believe it is necessary to provide an extension that will allow institutional identifiers to be broken up into department-level units. This desire has been shared by funding agencies, publishers and organizations alike. Inspired in part by ARKs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archival_Resource_Key) we envision qualifying tails on ROR ids, that allow sub-organization identifiers, and a common schema where we can make sense of these relations.

We created a tool kit prototype to expand ROR ids to departments. A template spreadsheet, in which organizations can populate parents and children of their sub-organizations, guides metadata creation. A script then transforms the tabular data into linked data, in line with the format of the ROR source. The schema includes links and controlled vocabularies to describe the subject of study of the department. Participants will be able to test the template on their institutions by describing a department of their choice and creating linked data based on their input.

We still have many questions; what the best data model would be, identifying fields of research; managing authority; and documenting change.

The challenges that we need to solve is how to make the datasets available and how to curate them. We want to solicit feedback on several proposals, including using a centralized GitHub repository or using WikiData.
Implementing departmental extensions requires buy-in both from ROR, who need to expand the data schema, and from the community, since they are the ones most familiar with their institutions. Our solution is technological, and it is now in the hands of the community to breathe life into it.