Skip to content

How CEDAR Defines and Applies IRIs (URIs, URLs)

This page describes the CEDAR unique identifier format. The advanced user may wish to consult the CEDAR Template Model Specification for more information.

A CEDAR artifact has a unique identifier that is of the following form: https://repo.metadatacenter.org / [type] / [UUID]

Here, type can be any of template-instances, template-fields, template-elements, templates, or folders. A UUID is a unique 36-character string with 4 hyphens embedded, as in the following: 4595e3d3-b0c5-467b-a967-fec870801624 .

These IRIs are not directly resolvable, but can be plugged into one of the following forms to try to resolve them:

  • Folder: https://cedar.metadatacenter.org/dashboard?folderId= followed by the encoded IRI
  • Template: https://cedar.metadatacenter.org/templates/edit/ followed by the IRI
  • Element: https://cedar.metadatacenter.org/elements/edit/ followed by the IRI
  • Field: https://cedar.metadatacenter.org/fields/edit/ followed by the IRI
  • Metadata Instance: https://cedar.metadatacenter.org/instances/edit/ followed by the IRI

CEDAR users also have unique identifiers, which are encoded in any artifact that the user creates or updates. These are of the form https://metadatacenter.org/users / [UUID]

CEDAR metadata instances also create another kind of template-element-instance identifer, but these are not of practical use to anyone using the CEDAR user interface.