A key focus for our research and delivery work at the ODI at the moment is exploring how to design sustainable and trustworthy data institutions. Data institutions are organisations that steward data on behalf of a community. They have a variety of legal forms, roles and purposes.
Yesterday I wrote (again!) about identifiers and specifically, how different communities have been designing and using identifier systems within their business and data ecosystems. In that post I provided an outline of centralised and federated models for assigning identifiers. Both of those models rely on organisations that are known as registration agencies, registration authorities or registrars.
In this post, I’m going to briefly explore the role of registration agencies as a specific form of data institution.
What problem are registration agencies solving?
Organisations working within the same sector, whether they are publishing books, shipping cargo, manufacturing cars or streaming media, need to be able to consistently identify things. Which book has been sold? Where did this cargo container come from? When was this car manufactured? Which artist produced this song?
Whether a group of organisations are competing with one another, providing services or funding to each other, or collaborating as part of a supply chain, they need to be able to refer to the physical and digital objects, people, places and things that are core to their businesses.
Consistent, unique identifiers are one of the building blocks of data infrastructure. As I described in my previous blog post, there are different ways to create identifiers, but a common pattern is to use a registration agency as a central point of coordination.
Registration agencies fulfill the role of having an independent, cross-industry organisation responsible for assigning and managing identifiers for those things of shared interest.
What data does a registration agency steward?
The core role of a registration agency is to govern the identifier scheme. That will involve deciding on details such as the syntax and rules for constructing identifiers, how they are assigned and by whom. It will also manage how the scheme evolves over time in order to support the changing needs of its community. Identifier schemes are standards for data and need to be maintained over the long term.
Registration agencies might directly create and assign identifiers at the request of its community. Or it might delegate that activity to other organisations. Depending on the specifics of the identifier scheme, the agency may only manage a small amount of data.
For example, the IFPI is the Registration Agency for the ISRC identifier used in the music industry since 1986. As an organisation, to create an ISRC for music you are publishing, you first apply for a registration code (a prefix used in the identifiers) from a national agency. You can then locally assign identifiers to your recordings. There is no requirement to register the individual codes with either IFPI or the national agency. There isn’t a central database of the identifiers. So for a long time the IFPI will likely only have had a small database listing the prefixes that had been assigned to specific organisations.
Other registration agencies capture more information about the things that are being identified. Organisations requesting an identifier either provide that data at the point of assignment or later deposit it with the agency. This seems to me to be a more common setup: having a central database supports a variety of additional use cases. For example, it can help answer some of the questions I posed above, e.g. when was this car manufactured?
In 2016, IFPI worked with a vendor called SoundExchange to launch a search engine and database, although this is not a complete source of all the data. This presumably addressed needs not covered by the existing system.
So, the data stewarded by a registration agency may vary. It may ranges from basic administrative information about the identifier scheme to a much broader set of data deemed to be useful to the community. Registration agencies may be key data intermediaries in their sector and so fulfill a wider purpose. This is why there is often commercial interest and competing projects to creating identifier schemes for specific industries, there is a lot of potential value to be captured.
How are they setup, and how do they approach sustainability?
In practice any community could work together to setup a common identifier scheme and an organisation to manage it. It just needs a shared understanding of the value of common identifiers and/or a common registry. For example, ZooBank and the LSID in the biosciences. Or the role of the IEEE in managing identifiers the electronics industry.
Existing data intermediaries may branch out into launching identifier schemes to support aggregation and distribution of other data. For example, Refinitiv’s PermId.
Governments also often setup registers and organisations to steward them. For example, Companies House in the UK. Registers frequently address a different set of needs, but assigning identifiers is frequently part of the task of maintaining a register.
Governments can create registers and registration agencies whenever they see fit. As can commercial organisations and community initiatives, given sufficient agreement, funding and resources.
A fourth approach to starting a registration agency is via ISO. Some identifier schemes end up being published as international standards. According to ISO policy, if a new standard identifier is going to require a registration process, then ISO will appoint an organisation as the official registration authority for that standard. This creates a monopoly situation so there is a process of review of the proposed approach, the agency and their approach to sustainability.
ISO publish a list of registration agencies for ISO standards. It includes IFPI as the agency for the ISRC standard
Registration agencies can charge fees for providing the registration services. But ISO requires those to be done on a cost recovery basis only. Approval for the charging of fees requires an additional level of review within ISO. But an agency might provide other supporting services.
Looking across some of the ISO appointed authorities, many appear to charge fees for registration both at the point of assignment of an identifier and on an annual basis. Many also seem to offer additional services and/or operate on a membership basis.
Different approaches to governance
From my reading so far, it seems that registration agencies supporting identifier schemes that are part of the public sector, commercial or community initiatives tend to be more centralised.
Looking across the ISO nominated registration agencies, these tend to use a federated assignment approach, similar to the IFPI, where much of the work is delegated to national agencies with the primary agency primarily acting as the custodian of the overall scheme and a point of coordination. The primary registration agency might also be a fallback for circumstances where a national agency hasn’t been appointed.
This country based approach makes sense for international standards: national agencies can work more closely with their communities.
Another example of this approach is the International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) which is governed by the ISNI International Agency which appears to have been set up specifically for this purpose. It’s work is delegated to a long list of specific assignment agencies. One of which is the British Library. As it happens, the British Library fulfills a similar role for a number of identifier schemes. This suggests that long-term sustainability for the identifier scheme and the primary registration agency is related to the sustainability of a broader set of organisations which might be acting as a national registration agency only as part of their operations.
One slightly different approach to governance is that of the DOI Foundation, which is the ISO appointed registration agency for DOI identifiers. DOIs can be assigned to a very broad category of different things and so, while the Foundation does delegate to other agencies, these aren’t along national lines. Instead there are different DOI registration agencies for different communities and purposes.
One example is CrossRef which works in the publishing industry, another is EIDR which operates in the entertainment industry. Both are covered by common rules published by the DOI Foundation which outlines acceptable business models, roles and and responsibilities.
While the individual agencies run their own technical platforms, the DOI Foundation also provides some common technical infrastructure to support its registration agencies and enable long-term persistence of the identifiers. This common infrastructure was moved to a separate not-for-profit in 2014, apparently as a means to increase trust.
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