extra-docs/about.md

@@ -59,7 +59,75 @@ flowchart LR
     USER1 ~~~ USER2 ~~~ USER3
 ```
 
+## Curation workflows
+
+Depending on the nature of the metadata and the respective audiences for producing
+consuming metadata, curation workflow differ substantially. The following sections
+collect some ideas and constraints to keep in mind when designing such workflows
+in this context.
+
+### PIDs also require curation
+
+Persistent identifiers (PID) play a key role in this metadata concept. Data
+models and vocabularies can change flexibly, but records still describe one and
+the same `Thing` when the PID identical.
+
+Persistent identifiers allow referencing entities in contexts where not all
+information about an entity is available. One can reference a `Person` without
+having to reveal possibly sensitive information about that `Person` at the same
+time. For example, a public `Person` record about an academic may only contain
+a name and a work contact email (equivalent to the information available on
+a corresponding author in a journal publication). At the same time, an internal
+`Person` record would have additional information, like a private cell phone number.
+The public record can be generated from the richer, internal record by stripping
+information.
+
+#### PIDs may require mapping
+
+However, an identifier itself can also carry information. For example, an ORCID
+identifier typically can be used to reveal the name of a person. Hence when an
+ORCID is used as the PID for a metadata record, any place where the identifier
+is mentioned, also reveals the name of the person.  If the identifier used for
+an internal, protected record and a corresponding public record are the same,
+cross-referencing may be enabled unintentionally.
+
+In such cases, it can be necessary to maintain mapping tables for PIDs of the
+same entity in different contexts.
+
+Maintaining a separate PID mapping is also an instrument to aid (future)
+anonymization of records. When the mapping is destroyed (and other conditions
+are fulfilled too), a PID-based re-identification is potentially made impossible.
+
+#### PIDs may require curation
+
+When metadata records are submitted by non-experts these records already need to have
+PIDs in order to enable submission of multiple, interlinked records. It is advisable
+to use dedicated (actually only temporarily persistent) PIDs for this purpose.
+
+The reason is that a submitter cannot necessarily be trusted to use the PID of an
+existing record to make further statements. Instead, they may create a new record,
+with the same information as an existing one, and consequently use a new PID to link
+information to this entity. While a curation could keep both records, and declare them
+"same as" of each other, this needlessly inflates the number of records, increases
+the maintenance load, and complicates queries.
+
+Instead, curation could merge the two records found to be on the same entity,
+and retain only the already existing one, and therefore just one relevant PID.
+Subsequently, all PID references of the duplicate record in the submission
+could be replaced with this original PID.
+
+Using a dedicated PID space for pre-curation PIDs, such as
+`inm7:pending/<random-id>` can help the curation process by making them easier
+to detect. Moreover, using random, auto-generated PIDs for new, pre-curation
+records also eases the tasks for submitters. They do not have to learn and follow
+possible rules for PID generations, such as using particular PID systems for certain
+types of records (e.g., DOIs for publications, ORCID for researchers, ROR IDs for
+organizations, RRIDs for resources, etc). This task could be left to professional
+curators.
+
+
 ## Acknowledgements
 
-This work was funded by
+This work was funded by the MKW-NRW: Ministerium für Kultur und Wissenschaft
-
+des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen under the Kooperationsplattformen 2022 program,
+grant number: KP22-106A.