The Applicability of the Persistent Identification of Instruments (PIDINST) Metadata Schema for complex compound instruments

Sac Medina  , Federico Guillermo Diaz Capriles, Christian Langenbach  , Christian Odenthal, Darwin Schlenk, Matthias Sperl, Christina Pätzold, Witold Arndt 

The Persistent Identification of Instruments (PIDINST) schema, developed by the Research Data Alliance (RDA), provides a standardized framework for globally unique, persistent identifiers to scientific instruments. In this paper, we explore the applicability of the PIDINST metadata schema to three experimental facilities from different research areas of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). We aim to evaluate the degree of applicability of the schema on different use cases to highlight its strengths and identifying possible areas for improvement. The methodology consisted of conducting a survey. For each facility, the instruments were described using the PIDINST schema. The value for each property was assigned a category and subsequently counted and averaged. The results of our study suggest that the PIDINST schema is around 70 % applicable to our three use cases. The remaining 30 % requires a deeper analysis due to the limitations of our method.