What is the current position of ABCD with regard to person identifiers?

[qgroom]

Can a person be uniquely identified with one of more identifiers in ABCD?
Is there any plan to include it in future versions?

[DavidFichtmueller]

Short answer: yes,
Long answer: it is slightly complicated for historic reasons, but for ABCD 2 mostly, and for ABCD 3 completely.

In ABCD 2 the XML Schema has the complex type Contact, which is used by elements that can be a person or institution like /DataSets/DataSet/Units/Unit/Owner . I has the element URIs as a repeatable wrapper element for the element URL(!). That last element was an error and was fixed in the minor version 2.06b to /URIs/URI. It serves precisely that purpose: multiple different identifiers, can be used, both for person or institutions.

However, for the two elements where this identifier matters most: GatheringAgent and Identification/Identifiers/Identifier, the complex type Contact was not used. This how has been fixed in ABCD 3.0 XML. Here both GatheringAgent and Identifier (as in the person who did the identification) now used the same complex type and can be used with URIs. Also URIs themselves were renamed to /ResourceURIs/ResourceURI

Here you can find the schema documentations for the XML https://abcd.tdwg.org/xml/documentation/ABCD_3.0/

In the ABCD 3 Ontology, the class Contact has a property ResourceURI as well for that purpose.

I hope this helps.