Use Case Scenarios

The following are some scenarios where minting a handle will be valuable.

• You have a dataset on your desktop that you intend to submit to a data centre in the future but you would like to refer to it right now in a journal article you are writing.
  • Publish or upload the dataset to a publicly accessible location.
  • Use the Handle Service to mint a handle with the description of the dataset and the accessible URL.  
  • Your minted handle can now be included as a "clickable" reference in your draft. 
  • When the article is published people start referring to your data in other articles using the handle you minted.
  • When you move the dataset, login to the ARDC Handle service again and update the location details. 
  • Any references to your dataset using the handle will be automatically redirect  and you don't have to correct every reference to it in the literature.

• You are part of a national cross disciplinary collaborative research centre on alpine regions. The centre is creating a loose data federation that queries and harvests metadata from your database.  You maintain the database on your departmental web server, but you intend to change jobs and move to another university next year.
  • Use the Handle Service to mint a handle pointing to the database in your current organisation's web server.
  • Circulate that clickable address, your handle, to your colleagues and to the "machinery" of the data federation.
  • When you move and take the data with you, login to the ARDC Handle service again and update the location details. 
  • Any references to your dataset using the handle will be automatically redirected  and you don't have to correct every reference to it in the literature.

• You are a data services manager at the Department of Primary Industries and you publish environmental observations which research communities use nationally. An election is in the offering and reliable sources indicate that your department will be merged with the Department of Tourism to form a new department with a new name, a new website and URL location.
  • Use the Handle Service to mint a handle.
  • Circulate that clickable address to major users of the datasets.
  • When the merger happens and the new address is available, login to the ARDC Handle service again and update the location details. 
  • Any references to your dataset using the handle will be automatically redirected and you don't have to correct every reference to it in the literature.
  • There will be no interruption of access to your data and you don't have to contact every registered user.

There are some scenarios where using the ARDC Handle Service would not be appropriate. For example purely internal system identifiers are not within the scope of this service.