Streamlining Facility Data Publications, Identification and Management

This short talk shows how FAST approaches the identification and traceability of research equipment such as electron microscopes. FAST is a web application for facility access and management, developed for the EXCITE2 network, which coordinates access to European research infrastructure. Alongside proposal and transnational access management (TNA), FAST maintains a database of facilities, equipment, and metadata using standard approaches like ORCID and PID. Research equipment can change over time, and aspects like add-ons and modules often change between TNA calls. An instrument identifier tells you what piece of equipment was used, but not what it looked like when the data was collected. This presents both an opportunity and a challenge: linking data publications back to the equipment used to produce them is only reliable if you can account for how that instrument has changed over time. FAST has 2 of the pieces needed to solve this: equipment records with metadata, an audit trail of what changed when. The work presented is about connecting data in a pragmatic and meaningful way. FAST is in active development, so we’ll present our progress, what decisions were made, and what remains open. What attributes are meaningful to capture for traceability? How granular should it be? How do you version a physical object? This isn’t a unique problem and we're curious whether the PID community has encountered it elsewhere, and what approaches have worked.