The use of PIDs for journal articles, books, datasets, people and funders is now commonplace within publishing workflows and there are other initiatives underway such as grants, software and organizations. However, there are many entities that could be usefully associated with a PID and machine actionable metadata outside of these categorisations. Examples include a PID for work performed by someone at an institution (i.e. an employment record or study credit), a PID for a qualification gained at an institution (i.e. a degree or professional qualification record), or a PID for a research infrastructure facility, such as a high powered laser or research vessel. The potential use cases for PIDs are almost endless. We propose an on-demand service that enables PIDs to be created on demand, associated with domain appropriate metadata and persisted. This presentation will cover the issue, describe a flexible and metadata agnostic solution, demo a working prototype, and discuss how the community can make a Persisted and Identified Metadata as a Service (PIMaaS) service a reality.
