1.
Francisco Lopez
Treaty Support Officer
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources
for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), FAO
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the
context of the International Treaty

2.
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) in the
context of the International Treaty
 The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources
for Food and Agriculture objectives are conservation
and sustainable use of plant genetic resources
 Global Operations related to the transfer of PGRFA
material within a Multilateral System of Access and
Benefit Sharing
 Article 17 on the Global Information System on plant
genetic resources for food and agriculture
 Standards and work on Permanent Unique Identifiers
in the first Programme of Work

3.
Current Situation
 Overview: More than 1750 plant genebanks worldwide
with more than 7,4 million accessions
 The material is exchanged every day worldwide
 The material is provided, in most cases, without the
additional non-confidential information (eg. genotypic
and phenotypic information)
 The recipients of the material usually change the ID after
the transfer
 There is duplicated material
 There are no automated mechanisms to discover where the
material is
 Not much added value is incorporated to the material

4.
Identifiers Are Like Glue
 Linking PGRFA data stored in a constellation of
systems
 Linking phenotypic, genotypic and geographic data
with PGRFA Multi-Crop passport information
 Permanent Unique Identifiers (PUIs) are a necessary
step towards integration
 We also need rules for their assignation to
be applied by a community
 Technical solutions and protocols

5.
Key Feature of PUIDs
 be unique, i.e. unambiguously identify a specific object or
intellectual asset;
 be permanent, i.e. always valid: the same object will be
forever associated to the same identifier;
 be opaque, i.e. nothing about the associated object should
be inferable by the structure of the identifier;
 be actionable, i.e. a defined procedure for name resolution
exists to access the information associated to the object
once the identifier is known.
 be discoverable, i.e. given details of an object, it is possible
to retrieve its identifier.
Relations between objects can be modelled

6.
Several Top Candidates Evaluated
 Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) and Persistent
Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs)
 Digital Object Identifier (DOIs) [Best for PGRFA]
 Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs)
 Universally Unique Identifiers (UUID)
 Archival Resource Keys (ARK)

7.
The Distinctive Features of DOIs

8.
What does a DOI look like?
 10.1371/journal.pgen.1003477
 10.1111/1467-9388.00298
 10.1038/nrg1729
How do we resolve a DOI?
 http://dx.doi.org/{DOI name}
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nrg1729

9.
DOIs for the PGRFA Community
 Global Survey on metadata descriptors associated to
DOIs to define the minimum set of PGRFA metadata -
Core fields
 Subsequent research focus group
 Guidelines for users
 FAO becomes an intermediary to offer free-of-charge
DOI registration services for the PGRFA community
 Pilot phase with projects in the field with consolidated
crop communities

10.
Core fields for PGRFA
 Location
 Identifier
 Date
 Method
 Name
Example: Location can be the FAO Wiews
code used for Genebanks, the GrBio code,
the GEO coordinates, the name of the
institution holding the material, the name
of the individual holding the material
They work ontologies and targets

11.
Thank you
Francisco Lopez
Treaty Support Officer
International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources
for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA)
Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
Viale delle Terme di Caracalla, 00153 Rome, Italy
Tel: +39 06 570 56343
Skype: francisco.lopez.itpgrfa