2026-10-27 –, LUMC01
In this session, you will learn how to implement PIDs practically as part of a major interoperability project, by taking a workflow-focused approach. You will gain insight into user research and design techniques to clarify requirements and facilitate alignment between collaborators, and discover how to approach PID workflows pragmatically to ensure implementability, maintainability and adoption.
How do you approach incorporating PIDs effectively into a major project? How do you understand what workflows need to be supported to enable FAIR practices across the research lifecycle? In this session, you will learn how to approach the discovery process for PID workflows through our examples of two major projects, FAIR Samples and FAIR Station.
Both are focused on developing end-to-end research workflows through implementing interoperability between existing research tools, and a major part of this work revolves around how PIDs (in our case, ORCID, DOI, ROR, IGSN ID, PIDINST, DMP ID) are utilised as vessels for data and metadata transfer between tools across all stages of the research lifecycle.
FAIR Samples is focused on end-to-end sample workflows, while FAIR Station relates to end-to-end field station project and output tracking; however, the process of understanding workflow and PID requirements is generalisable to projects independent of domain.
You will learn how to utilise user research and design techniques to clarify the needs of representative personas that are engaged in research workflows, detail use cases to facilitate communication and agreement across parties involved in the project, and considerations that are particularly relevant to PID workflows, such as PID “stewardship” and access flows. You will discover how to approach PID implementation practically in a concrete project with specific tools being integrated, to ensure maintainability and sustainability of the PID pipelines.
You will also gain insight into how to focus the design on usability and user-friendliness, making PIDs easy to use and utilise them as an integrating force that enhances data discovery, rather than an additional point of friction that real-life researchers will not adopt.
We hope that you will come away from this session with a blueprint on how to approach major interoperability projects in a pragmatic way, and how to anticipate and avoid common design pitfalls.
Maria Praetzellis is the Associate Director of the UC Curation Center (UC3) at the California Digital Library. She drives the strategic planning and development of scholarly infrastructure supporting research data, including DMP Tool, Merritt, and EZID. Her work advances Open Science practices and research data management through open tools and services spanning digital preservation, data publication, curation, persistent identifiers, and data management planning.
I am CEO of Research Space, which provides RSpace, a research orchestration platform that includes an electronic lab notebook and a sample management system. I participate actively in RDM and PID community activities, e.g. as Co-Chair of the RDA Working with PIDS in Tools IG, the Research Data Architectures in Institutions IG, and the MaLDReTH Map of Tools used in the Research Lifecycle, and through active participation in the PIDS for Instruments IG and the GORC WG. I have also been active in fostering interoperability between research tools, via engagement with the 20+ tools with which RSpace integrates, and projects such as in the US NSF Vertical Interoperability Conference award, and currently as Director of the NIH Vertical Interoperability Idea Lab. I also am a member of DataCite and Dryad advisory boards.