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.

An International GeoSample Number (IGSN), is a unique string created to identify a sample object in an online environment. The IGSN is made up of two components, a handle prefix and a suffix, separated by a forward slash. The syntax guidelines are summarised on the IGSN wiki pages.

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.

 FIXME 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.

  FIXME Example: hdl: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

  FIXME 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): hdl:10273/GeoB3375-1
  Example http://hdl.handle.net/10273/GeoB3375-1

Please refer to the syntax guidelines for more detail.

Due to the diversity of samples that IGSN tries to accommodate, including historic samples with a very limited set of available metadata. The IGSN metadata scheme is not a standard metadata scheme for sample description, it is used only to transmit core metadata needed for the registration, resolution, and administration of the IGSN resolver service. Metadata schemes in community databases are defined by the respective scientific communities.

Metadata elements are:

The XML schema can be downloaded from our code repository: (Trac) http://trac.gfz-potsdam.de/igsn/browser/IGSN/schema or (SVN) http://svnext.gfz-potsdam.de/igsn/.

The documentation of the metadata and schema has moved to the IGSN Trac Wiki http://trac.gfz-potsdam.de/igsn/wiki/WikiStart

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.

The policy for namespace allocation is currently in its proposal phase.

Back to IGSN overview