The Digital Author Identifier (DAI) was a Dutch initiative to create an person identifier for researchers to (1) enhance linkability of
scholarly communication
Scholarly communication involves the creation, publication, dissemination, and discovery of academic research, primarily in peer-reviewed journals and books. It is “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, ev ...
and other types of output to a single
author
In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work exists in written, graphic, visual, or recorded form. The act of creating such a work is referred to as authorship. Therefore, a sculpt ...
and (2) to disambiguate between authors with similar or even the same names.
As a form of
authority control, DAI was envisioned to assign a unique national id for every author active within a Dutch university,
university of applied sciences
A vocational university or university of applied sciences (UAS), less commonly called a polytechnic university is an institution of higher education and increasingly research that provides applied professional education and grants academic de ...
, or research institute. The DAI is prepared from the
ISO standard
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries.
Me ...
"ISNI" (
International Standard Name Identifier). The DAI links the
PICA database in institutional libraries with the
METIS national
research information system subsequently made available to international search engines. Specifically, SURFfoundation has, in cooperation with OCLC PICA, created a connection with PICA National Thesaurus Authornames (NTA) that is supplied and maintained by university libraries. Important to this is the connection between the research information system Metis and the repositories.
Superseded by ORCID
The DAI was part of the national knowledge infrastructure, but the (Dutch)
scientific community, has been using other identifiers as well, such as
ORCID,
ResearcherID, and
Scopus
Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004. The ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is c ...
Id. In the Netherlands, in 2025, the research community seems to have been converging towards using ORCID as the national identifier based on the fact that universities, and the
KNAW promote the use of ORCID, not DAI.
See also
*
ORCID
*
VIAF
References
{{Reflist
External links
Martin Enserink in Science, 27 march 2009, vol. 323, p.1662–1664 (not Open Access available)
Author identification
Data modeling
Identifiers