[FEATURE] Add Unique Entity ID (UEI) tags as external IDs

[Marshlight]

Describe the problem you would like to solve
Domestic and international organizations that receive funding from the US federal government through SAM.gov must have a UEI (https://sam.gov/content/duns-uei). It would be helpful to link UEI to ROR, as some USG funders are moving toward using UEI to disambiguate awardee institutions, and interoperability with ROR would (hopefully) increase ease of ROR adoption for other data calls.

Describe the solution you'd like
Add UEI to ROR external IDs.

Who would benefit from this feature?
Government funders trying to track the output of organizations with UEI; those with UEI looking for their ROR (this is admittedly niche)

Additional information
I am using the Edugain ID ticket (#146) as reference for this one. I have done some UEI to GRID ID work already, and I'm sure there are some followup questions I'll need to answer.

[amandafrench]

@Marshlight Thanks so much for submitting this! Do you think it's possible to publish at least a UEI to ROR mapping in spreadsheet form? If so, we'd be happy to include that in our user documentation ASAP.

[amandafrench]

Or, I should add, the UEI to GRID mapping -- that would be easy to add ROR to, since the ROR dataset is already natively mapped to GRID.

[Marshlight]

@amandafrench we are working on cleaning up a UEI to GRID map for you, but are running into some data QA problems - multiple UEIs per GRID. This is probably one of those things that will need continued curation and I can't guarantee it's going to be complete or reliable...but we can send what we have, soon!

[amandafrench]

@Marshlight Ah, interesting. But yes, I think many others would be interested in even a rough version of this mapping. Thanks for working on it!

[Marshlight]

crosslinked-institution-identifiers.csv
Ok, here is a rough draft with institution names, GRID ID, UEI (from SAM.gov), CAGE (a DOD specific ID), and DUNS (old and not complete but it's there anyway). You'll notice several duplicate lines, most notably for West Virginia University which has 10 rows for some reason. I have not tried to simplify this yet in any way yet, but I know it needs to be done. I probably won't get to it in the short term, but happy to further discuss QA.

[poworoznek]

GRID/ROR to UEI will probably not end up being exactly 1:1 due to differences in the taxonomy but may get close(r). GRID to CAGE will always be 1:many for many institutions.

[amandafrench]

@Marshlight Sorry, I'm getting a "Not Found" message when I click on the link to the csv - you can email it to support at ror dot org if you like

[Marshlight]

crosslinked-institution-identifiers.csv
Does this work instead? Weird!

[amandafrench]

@Marshlight Yes, that worked! Thanks!

[amandafrench]

@Marshlight @poworoznek We've recently issued a call for comment on adding new external IDs to ROR, and UEI is a top candidate to pilot with. Can you take a look and comment before August 16th? Google Doc for comments / suggestions is linked from the announcement: https://ror.org/blog/2024-07-18-id-ideas/

[Marshlight]

@amandafrench incredibly excited about this! I don't have specific feedback on the announcement text itself, but I'm gathering that the UEI-ROR lookup needs to be open source and maintained by us or someone else to be included, right? Or can ROR do some of the matching QA/QC? The folks behind the DTIC tickets (ror-community/ror-updates#6112, ror-community/ror-updates#6478, ror-community/ror-updates#6649) are likely to launch their own UEI-ROR mapping via an updated org authority file later in the summer/fall, and they probably will have put more time in by the time they're done. I don't think I can tag them here, but let me know when we get closer to UEI-ROR matching being a reality, and I can do it via email.

[adambuttrick]

@Marshlight In order to maintain this mapping in ROR, we would need to be able to derive the UEI values from their source, with the data being available in an openly licensed form. I did a cursory review of the SAM.gov data bank files and did not see these as being immediately available, so any details you can provide about how we could access and under what terms would be appreciated. I work directly with the DTIC staff on the issues you tagged, so I can follow up with them as well.

[Marshlight]

@adambuttrick hmm I have run into this issue as well. I am pretty sure https://sam.gov/data-services/Entity%20Registration?privacy=Public ought to do it, but I remember having some difficulty. Although I am looking at Public V2/SAM_PUBLIC_MONTHLY_V2_20240602.dat right now, where the first column is UEI and the fourth is CAGE; a very small amount of manual spot checking matches what I posted in this thread before. So maybe they fixed it from the last time I tried to do this!