6. Registration

6.1. Central registration at PID providers

The following resources (Table 6.1) provide technical guidance for institutions to publish and manage PID records at PID providers compliant with RDA PIDINST recommendations.

Table 6.1 Technical guidance for publishing and managing instrument PIDs at PID providers compliant with RDA PIDINST recommendations. The table provides links to the relevant metadata schema that accompanies PID records at PID providers.

PID provider	Technical resource	Metadata schema
ePIC	ePIC Cookbook	PIDINST
DataCite	DataCite Cookbook	PIDINST to DataCite

6.2. Local registration at institutional instrument providers

In order to register instrument PIDs at a provider service, institutional instrument providers must publish a landing page for each instrument PID to resolve to. These publications might be encoded using standard markup languages (e.g. HTML), structured, machine-actionable web resources (e.g. World Wide Consortium’s (W3C) Linked Data), or specialist standards for describing instruments and their inherited properties and processes (e.g. Open Geospatial Consortium’s (OGC) SensorML, W3C Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) ontology). Whichever method of publication is used, it is necessary to ensure there is enough metadata on landing pages to unambiguously identify the instrument (see Landing page content). The URL address is also used to populate the LandingPage property of the PIDINST schema, adding this locator to the PID’s metadata record.