ROR IDs + PIC Numbers = 💘?

(I originally posted this in the chatrooms of the recent Realising the EOSC conference. I didn’t get any feedback there, so I’ll try my luck here.)

I’ll share an idea that’s been floating around in my head for a while… We love PIDs for organizations: ROR of course, but also Grid and Ringgold. But, as far as I know, there’s no mapping between any of these PIDs and the PIC numbers (9-digit Participant Identification Code) that are used in CORDIS and other EC/EU systems.

In my opinion, mapping RORs onto PICs and vice versa would be very handy to not only mine CORDIS data, but also to consolidate the (European) PID graph, especially with all the ongoing/upcoming work on the EOSC.

This is anecdotal evidence, but I also remember conversations about MERIL/CatRIS and PIDs for research infrastructures, during the MERIL-2 final conference. We mentioned that RIs should get PIDs, and that we should also (re)use PIDs for the organizations that host/coordinate the RIs. Some RI coordinators mentioned that PICs are the IDs that they use the most in their systems.

We (Thunken) would love to work on that and recontribute the output to ROR, but not without some feedback/validation from the PID community first, so… Thoughts? Anyone wants to join forces? Seek some funding together?

Luc, mapping PIDs for organizations is important, but I would ask two questions:

  • is access to the PID and its metadata open and the information can be reused without restrictions? I wouldn’t spend my time on integrating with information that is not open.
  • where should the mapping take place? ROR (and GRID) metadata support a number of PIDs for organizations, but adding every possible organization identifier (e.g. all the national ones) would not scale so well. It would sometimes be easier to do the mapping to ROR (and/or other widely used organization identifier) in the metadata of the more specialized organization identifier.