Lessons Learned from ORAP: Structuring Prizes with PIDs in Practice

A new PID is born. In this session, you will discover how the Open Registry for Awards and Prizes (ORAP) helps you bring structure to fragmented award information and turn scattered data into something reusable, linkable, and genuinely useful. If you have ever tried to track prizes awarded across departments, databases, or spreadsheets, you already know how messy this landscape can be. ORAP aims to fix exactly that. We will start with a practical introduction to the registry, which officially launched in February 2026 with more than 1,900 curated awards and a metadata model consisting of 22 fields. Each award receives a unique ORAP-PRIZE-ID, giving it a stable and citable identity. Where possible, ORAP also connects awards to external knowledge sources such as Wikidata, and future extensions will include linking awarding organizations through ROR IDs to make the ecosystem even more interoperable. In a short live demo, you experience how ORAP can be used to explore and filter award data, support institutional reporting and enable new use cases in research information management. You will get insight into how the metadata schema is designed—what is included, what is not, and which fields are essential for describing awards in a consistent, machine readable way. Beyond the technical foundation, we’ll show how ORAP grows through a community-driven curation process. You learn how new awards are submitted, reviewed, improved, and finally integrated into the registry, and why community stewardship is crucial for keeping the dataset accurate, transparent, and up to date. This session is especially relevant if you work with research information systems, persistent identifiers or metadata standards and want to understand how prize data can be structured and integrated into the PID ecosystem. If you are curious how a new identifier system comes to life—and how you can contribute—this is your chance.