Identifiers in e-Science platforms for the ecological sciences

In the emerging Web of Data, publishing stable and unique identifiers promises great potential in using the web as common platform to discover and enrich data in the ecologic sciences. With our collaborative e-Science platform “BEFdata”, we generated and published unique identifiers for the data repository of the Biodiversity – Ecosystem Functioning Research Unit of the German Research Foundation (BEF-China; DFG: FOR 891). We linked part of the identifiers to two external data providers, thus creating a virtual common platform including several ecological repositories. We used the Global Biodiversity Facility (GBIF) as well the International Plant Name Index (IPNI) to enrich the data from our own field observations. We conclude in discussing other potential providers for identifiers for the ecological research domain. We demonstrate the ease of making use of existing decentralized and unsupervised identifiers for a data repository, which opens new avenues to collaborative data discovery for learning, teaching, and research in ecology