[DDI-SRG] DDI Agency pre-registration

[Pascal Heus]

All:
I've been working with Mary and Arofan on proposal for the 
implementation of a public registry for DDI agency identifiers. This is 
actually not trivial and presents both technical and organizational 
challenges. Since this need to be further reviewed and will take some 
time to be implemented, we have decided to setup a web page for the 
pre-registration of Agency identifiers at 
http://tools.ddialliance.org/?lvl1=community&lvl2=agencyid

The rationale behind it is that there are organizations and individuals 
that are producing DDI 3 today and they shouldn't have to wait to get an 
official ID for their agency. The proposed scheme is based on format 
similar to domain names but that do not change across time. the 
structure is:
[organization].[country].ddi
- The [organization] part is typically the abbreviation of the agency
- The [country] is the 2-letter country code or .org/.int for 
international organizations (.com is not allowed).
- The .ddi identifies this as an ID in the DDI registry to prevent 
conflict with other registries or classifications.
Few example: icpsr.us.ddi, odaf.org.ddi, ukda.uk.ddi
More details on the format/rules are in the web page.

There is at this point no formal process associated with the attribution 
of IDs (basically at our discretion at this time) and we cannot 
guarantee 100% that the format will remain the same (but will likely 
be). We feel however that it is urgent to move forward on this and would 
rather provide a simple mechanism rather than wait and have 
organizations make up their own IDs.

Could we add this as a topic for this week CC (that unfortunately I 
can't join, but can talk later in the day) with the idea that, unless 
there are strong objections, we move forward with this. We will then 
include a short blurb in the upcoming DDI newsletter (next week) and 
post announcements on various mailing lists. Suggestion/contributions 
most welcomed. Should we pre-assign ID's to members of the Alliance?

thanks
Pascal