An Allocating Agent is an institution which allocates IGSN names on behalf of the IGSN registration agency of IGSN. An Allocating Agent may delegate technical functions and services to one or more data centres.

An IGSN Community is a scientific community of practice, e.g. petrology, ocean sediments, critical zone, etc. The samples registered by a community are made accessible through a common portal. The community also defines the IGSN Naming Convention and metadata application application profile.

Group of related topics, e.g. earth science, exogeology, biomedical research, material science, etc. Each domain will be given a separate handle prefix. This will make namespace governance more transparent and help to keep naming of entities unique within the respective namespances.

The IGSN is organised by namespaces to ensure globally unique allocation of IGSNs to samples. The standard format of the IGSN is a nine character string consisting of a three character namespace identifier and a six character sample number.

Example: PRR001407 (a sample from the US Polar Rock Repository)

The Handle value is concatenated by the following rule:

prefix/<igsn>

where prefix is 10273 and <igsn> is the value (IGSN) assigned by an Allocating Agent.

Example: 10273/PRR001407

This identifier can be resolved to the URL of the metadata page of the sample through any handle resolver, e.g. http://hdl.handle.net

Example: http://hdl.handle.net/10273/PRR001407

IGSN user communities may adopt their own IGSN formats, if necessary.

Example (IGSN): GeoB3375-1 (a gravity core from the core repository of MARUM, Univ. Bremen, Germany)

Example (Handle): 10273/GeoB3375-1

CrossRef recommended PID syntax: http://www.crossref.org/help/Content/02_Getting_started/Establishing_a_DOI_suffix_pattern.htm

DRAFT

Due to the diversity of samples that IGSN tries to accommodate, including historic samples with a very limited set of available metadata, the only mandatory metadata in an IGSN Metadata Profile are the sample name and the sample type. Nevertheless, IGSN highly recommends to include the following metadata when you register your samples:

• Latitude
• Longitude
• Elevation (or water depth)
• Material
• Classification (if applicable)
• Age
• Field Program (cruise or land-based expedition)
• Field Name/Sample Name
• Collection date
• Parent IGSN (if applicable)

An IGSN Community can define a more detailed metadata application profile.

In order to assure the uniqueness of assigned IGSN names, the space of IGSN identifiers is subdivided into namespaces. Namespaces are assigned to Allocating Agents by the IGSN Registration Agency. The allocation of IGSNs within a namespace is governed by the allocation agents.

Example:

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