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Persistent Identifier

Data in DBRepo always has attached metadata (stored in the Metadata Database). This metadata is provided as machine-understandable context in various open-source formats that is available, even when the original data is not available anymore due to e.g. a retracted dataset (hence the name persistent). A persistent identifier globally, uniquely identifies a data record such as:

  • Database,
  • Table whose data is continously changed in the background (nature of databases),
  • View who show a denomination, joined schema or aggregated result of tables,
  • Subset which precisely identifies a data record to reproduce the same dataset.

Combining data versioning and queries, subsets can be precisely identified by storing the query that creates them and the time when the query was executed. We store both in a table inside the database we call the query store.

DOI

DBRepo uses the DOI system minted by DataCite, this is optional and not required to function for e.g. test deployments.