Francisco Lopez

Treaty Support Officer

International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources

for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), FAO

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the context of the International Treaty

Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the context of the International Treaty

The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture objectives are conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources

Global Operations related to the transfer of PGRFA material within a Multilateral System of Access and Benefit Sharing

Article 17 on the Global Information System on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture

Standards and work on Permanent Unique Identifiers in the first Programme of Work

Current Situation Overview: More than 1750 plant genebanks worldwide

with more than 7,4 million accessions The material is exchanged every day worldwide The material is provided, in most cases, without the

additional non-confidential information (eg. genotypic and phenotypic information)

The recipients of the material usually change the ID after the transfer

There is duplicated material There are no automated mechanisms to discover where the

material is Not much added value is incorporated to the material

Identifiers Are Like Glue Linking PGRFA data stored in a constellation of

systems

Linking phenotypic, genotypic and geographic data with PGRFA Multi-Crop passport information

Permanent Unique Identifiers (PUIs) are a necessary step towards integration

We also need rules for their assignation to

be applied by a community

Technical solutions and protocols

Key Feature of PUIDs be unique, i.e. unambiguously identify a specific object or

intellectual asset; be permanent, i.e. always valid: the same object will be

forever associated to the same identifier; be opaque, i.e. nothing about the associated object should

be inferable by the structure of the identifier; be actionable, i.e. a defined procedure for name resolution

exists to access the information associated to the object once the identifier is known.

be discoverable, i.e. given details of an object, it is possible to retrieve its identifier.

Relations between objects can be modelled

Several Top Candidates Evaluated Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) and Persistent

Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs)

Digital Object Identifier (DOIs) [Best for PGRFA]

Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs)

Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID)

Archival Resource Keys (ARK)

The Distinctive Features of DOIs

What does a DOI look like? 10.1371/journal.pgen.1003477

10.1111/1467-9388.00298

10.1038/nrg1729

How do we resolve a DOI?

http://dx.doi.org/{DOI name}

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrg1729

DOIs for the PGRFA Community Global Survey on metadata descriptors associated to

DOIs to define the minimum set of PGRFA metadata -Core fields

Subsequent research focus group

Guidelines for users

FAO becomes an intermediary to offer free-of-charge DOI registration services for the PGRFA community

Pilot phase with projects in the field with consolidated crop communities

Core fields for PGRFA

Location

Identifier

Date

Method

Name

Example: Location can be the FAO Wiewscode used for Genebanks, the GrBio code, the GEO coordinates, the name of the institution holding the material, the name of the individual holding the material

They work ontologies and targets

Thank you

Francisco LopezTreaty Support Officer International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA)

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00153 Rome, Italy Tel: +39 06 570 56343Skype: francisco.lopez.itpgrfa