Persistent Identification of Instruments

A Persistent Identifier (PID) for Instruments is a globally unique and enduring reference assigned to scientific instruments, such as sensors, microscopes, or telescopes. It is used for the identification of individual physical devices, not to categorize model types in general. These PIDs ensure that instruments are unambiguously identifiable across various platforms and over time, facilitating data provenance, reproducibility, and proper attribution in research. As part of the PID4NFDI project, we are providing the NFDI and the broader research community with two tools for creating, managing and exploring instrument PIDs:

  • B2INST: Assign PIDs to your research instruments.

  • Federated Search: Explore the PID graph for instruments, which contains instrument PIDs registered with both DataCite and B2INST.

To learn more about persistent identification of instruments, please check out our PID4NFDI Cookbook for a comprehensive summary.

B2INST

Create and Manage Instrument PIDs

B2INST is a service offered by EUDAT that enables researchers and institutes to register their instruments and to be able to persistently refer to these registrations in other services or publications. The tool assigns an ePIC PID to each registered instrument. It is free and open to everyone, with various log-in options available.

B2INST can be used by institutions and researchers alike.

  • As an individual researcher, you can register a PID for your personal research instruments via the user interface or API.

  • If you would like to assign PIDs for many instruments at your institution, you have the possibility to implement an automated workflow which uses the B2INST API to automatically assign instrument PIDs.

B2INST adopts the PIDINST metadata schema. Communities can be used to extend the PIDINST metadata schema with further metadata fields that are relevant for your use-case. If you have questions about instrument registration or would like to set up a consultation meeting regarding instrument registration at your institution, please contact us at pid4nfdi@lists.nfdi.de or via our contact form.

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Federated Search

Search and Explore Instrument PIDs

With the Federated Search, research instruments registered with a PID can be found through a single, unified interface. The platform queries all instrument records from both DataCite and B2INST, making key metadata fields from the PIDINST metadata schema jointly searchable – namely PID, owner, manufacturer, instrument type, model type, and measured variables. Result lists can be downloaded easily as JSON or (flattened) CSV files.

In the statistics section of this tool, you can explore your search results. Interactive line graphs and frequency tables illustrate the distributions for different metadata fields. You can also filter your data by clicking on table cells to find out more about subsets of your initial sample:

Instruments-1

Figure 1: Selecting a property value dynamically filters the statistics to the corresponding subset of records. Try it out here.

The index page provides an option to retrieve statistics for all instruments, allowing you to explore the full landscape of registered instruments. For example, you can see how instrument PIDs are still emerging but steadily growing:

Instruments-2

Figure 2: The number of registered instruments over time by PID provider (Try it out here).

While the statistics give an overview of the entire result set, connection plots can be retrieved for individual instrument records. Each plot illustrates how a specific instrument is linked to other PID-identified research resources, enabling you to see, for example, which datasets were generated using that instrument or which publications describe it. Take a look at the connections of the LSST Camera as an example of a large-scale instrument:

Instruments-3

Figure 3: Clicking on a node opens a tab with the landing page of the resource (Try it out here)

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