Developers love PIDs! They provide trustworthy, centralized, reliable sources of information that are always up to date, which allows us to make better, faster applications that play nicely with others. But sometimes it’s not so easy to integrate PIDs. Without a central registry to provide current, machine-readable information about which PIDs are out there, their status, their format and their metadata APIs, integrating a broad range of PIDs into an application is a formidable challenge. For example, at ORCID, several staff members have been working for months to compile a comprehensive list of PID types for research outputs for use in our application interface, and, in some cases, we’ve resorted to emailing individuals at various organizations just to find the correct format for a particular PID. This session will discuss some of the challenges that application developers face in integrating a full range of PIDs, workarounds that we’re currently using, and the great joy that a centralized PID registry would bring.
