Gillespie, ThomasZhang, QianSubramanian, Chelakara S.Han, Yan2025-09-242025-09-242016https://repository.ifla.org/handle/20.500.14598/5851The authors have broad representations across of a variety of domains including Oceanography, Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy, Neurosciences, and Libraries. The article is intended to: a) discuss the key concepts related to identifiers and define identifiers; b) explore characteristics of good and bad identifiers in general, along with an overview of popular identifiers; c) demonstrate a use case in a scientific domain of using identifiers via the data lifecycle; c) raise awareness of data collection, data analysis and data sharing for raw and post-processing data for data producers and data users. It is inevitable for multiple identifiers to co-exist in the data lifecycle, as the case study shows different needs of data producers and data users.engAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Articlehttp://2016.ifla.org/open accessIdentifieruse casedata lifecycle