KonsortSWD Measure 5.1: PID Service for variables report

Referencing research data and there inherit detailed entities supports FAIR usage. In measure 5.1 we enhance the state of the art of citing research data, by developing an infrastructure to reference detailed attributes, here initially variables, within such data. By assigning PIDs to these attributes, individual elements of the data files can be referenced and retrieved with the required metadata for machine-actionable and human access. The PIDs will not only enable citeability within scientific papers but also give access for processing the contained data itself, e.g., within script languages like R or phyton. This report provides detailed use cases, the necessary metadata schema, and the envisioned architecture for a general, maintainable, and scalable infrastructure that enables the registration of PIDs for small-scale attributes in Social Science research data. Besides the main functionality, we emphasize reusable and generalized components as a blueprint for other projects. All developed components will be published as open-source software.