BIG DATA for DISCOVERY SCIENCE
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The Big Data for Discovery Science Center (BDDS) - comprised of leading experts in biomedical imaging, genetics, proteomics, and computer science - is taking an "-ome to home" approach toward streamlining big data management, aggregation, manipulation, integration, and the modeling of biological systems across spatial and temporal scales.
 
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MINID

Creating a Minimal Viable Identifier (minid) infrastructure for
uniquely and unambiguously identifying research data products.

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The BDDS Minimal Viable Identifier (minid) pilot enables unambiguous naming and identification of research data products. Minids are designed to be lightweight, enabling simple creation and use, and requiring only minimal metadata to be specified about the object. Due to their lightweight nature minids can be associated with any data product and at any stage of the research lifecycle including raw, derived, and final data products. Association of minids with all biomedical data will enable researchers to unambiguously refer to data, track relationships between data, exchange references (rather than files) between researchers and applications, and verify the integrity of referenced data.

Biomedical researchers generate many digital objects of different types, sizes, and quality. Current practice provides for publishing "final" data products into repositories, obtaining digital object identifiers (DOIs) for those products, and recording DOIs in registries such as BioCADDIE. But what about the many intermediate, often transient, data products that are created during a research project? They are surely not all worthy of preservation and indexing. But imagine if every such data item had a unique identifier that anyone could resolve to access some basic metadata. Researchers, and their colleagues, would then be able to refer unambiguously to any data item, embed references to any data item in many different records (e.g., audit logs, provenance records), and know how to access data where access is possible. Moving to a culture where we pass around identifiers to data and know what they mean can have a transformative effect.

We have implemented a Minimal Viable Identifier (MINID) infrastructure in an effort to facilitate this cultural change.

Researchers can use the BDDS Minimal Viable Identifier tool to name and identify research data products. Association of minids with all biomedical data will enable researchers to unambiguously refer to data, track relationships between data, exchange references (rather than files) between researchers and applications, and verify the integrity of referenced data.

For additional detail on minid and how to use it, please look at this video.

Minids have been used extensively in the following “Use Cases”: