Additions to ACDD 1.3: Add identifier fields (`*_id`) for institutions and people

[MathewBiddle]

Identifiers for people (eg. ORCiD) and institutions (eg. ROR) are becoming more ubiquitous, it would be great if ACDD could include details about including these identifiers in netCDF metadata. Below are the fields to be considered, with appropriate definitions.

Field	Definition
creator_id	The identifier of the person (or other creator type specified by the creator_type attribute) principally responsible for creating this data.
publisher_id	The identifier of the person (or other entity specified by the publisher_type attribute) responsible for publishing the data file or product to users, with its current metadata and format.
creator_institution_id	The identifier for the institution of the creator; should uniquely identify the creator's institution. This attribute's value should be specified even if it matches the value of publisher_institution, or if creator_type is institution.
publisher_institution_id	The identifier for the institution that presented the data file or equivalent product to users; should uniquely identify the institution. If publisher_type is institution, this should have the same value as publisher_name.

We might want to split these into multiple issues. I started this as one bulk change, but am open to suggestions.

[ksauby]

Related to this issue, there were a couple of suggestions during the January 2026 ESIP session:

• For each ID attribute, include a corresponding attribute *_vocabulary, to indicate the vocabulary from which the ID is selected
• Alternatively, add new attributes to the convention with the *_uri suffix, where the value is a URL, and thus the vocabulary is identified within the URL.

[relphj]

And none of those work if a person has two IDs and both need to be included in the metadata. For example, a person wishes to include both an ORCID iD and a Researcher ID in the metadata. How would that be done? (Answer: it wouldn't.)

[mwengren]

AFAIK, the only solution in ACDD to address that multiple value use case is the contributor_name and contributor_role attributes:

https://wiki.esipfed.org/Attribute_Convention_for_Data_Discovery_1-3

Reading those again, in the ACDD guidance, I'm not 100% sure what the recommendation is to implement multiple names/roles, but, in IOOS, we interpreted it to mean that comma-separated values are the way to go (see the contributor_ attribute definitions and associated examples):

https://ioos.github.io/ioos-metadata/ioos-metadata-profile-v1-2#attribution

[MathewBiddle]

@relphj checkout the section on "Comma-Separated Lists"

[relphj]

Yes, I had forgotten about that proposal.