Investigate alternate ways of finding unique creators

[jeanetteclark]

The way we count creators right now is not ideal - just looking at names. Are there better ways to do this? ORCIDs are an obvious choice, but much of the legacy data doesn't have ORCIDs.

[mbjones]

ORCIDs is a good start.

The graph database we are building harmonizes the multiple identities of people and provides a way to map the association between multiple datasets and the multiple ways they are represented. See the ticket in DataONEorg/slinky#6

Right now, these consolidated entries come from Geolink work and represent our conservative guess at how to merge metadata records, DataONE accounts, ORCID ids, and other sources of information about people into a consistent set. @amoeba and @tommythelen should have more info.