We seek to explore a community-driven solution for globally unique identification of measuring instruments operated in the sciences. The group has developed a Metadata Schema for Persistent Identification of Instruments, which is endorsed by the Research Data Alliance as a Recommendation. Our primary task is to actively engage with and support communities in schema implementations and aim, thus, at widespread adoption of the Recommendation.

In 2025, the PID4NFDI project of Base4NFDI of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) developed a Web-interface for distributed search for instruments registered with either DataCite or B2INST. The service also provides extensive statistics on instrument registrations. The search interface is available at https://search.pidinst.org/.