March 23, 2022 / by Markus Döring

COL identifiers

Since the new infrastructure went live in December 2020, Catalogue of Life also switched to a new algorithm to generate stable identifiers for name usages which I have described in this blog post.

After evaluating the ID reports we generate with every release, we found that the majority of identifiers changed because either the status of the name had changed or the accepted name of a synonym had changed. The original idea was that such important changes should be reflected by an ID change. But it leads to a proliferation of identifiers and forces users to constantly update their mappings to the Catalogue of Life.

With the March 2022 edition we therefore change to a more conservative approach which only tries to evaluate the name alone. Status or parent/classification changes should not trigger any artifical ID changes anymore.