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The process of developing a data ingest plan for VIVO often focuses on each different data source independently, but in fact there may be some overlap among sources, whether those sources represent different types of data or different sources of the same type of data.
For example, people will probably come first from a human resource database – employees, departments, and the positions that connect employees and departments. But a grants ingest process will also bring in new people, as there may be investigators from other organizations listed. And when publications are ingested, a large institution may find there are tens of thousands of people records to keep straight.
In some future world that organizations like ORCID are working achieve, every researcher will have a unique international identifier, and this identifier will help disambiguate whether the John Doe that co-authored with a researcher at your institution is the same John H. Doe serving as an investigator on a grant. For now, the mechanisms of identifiers and the heuristics of disambiguation are important to recognize but not to solve – it's primarily important in planning your ingest processes to recognize that these questions are out there.
Addressing identity
We don't recommend using a person's name as part of their URI for the simple reason that their name may change. In fact, many data architects remember always using completely randomized, meaningless identifiers within URIs (for the part after the last /, known as the local name).
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