Animal Identification URN's - Farm-Data-Standards/URN-Lists GitHub Wiki

There are a number of official, semi-official, and ad-hoc forms of animal identification in use. This ranges from the regulated1 use of ISO 11784/11758 RFID for cattle and deer, through current official recording and traceability programme identifiers (some regulated), to breeding and recording scheme identifiers that are no longer actively used but which provide useful data or linkages between animals that need to be retained for future analysis.

Identifiers fall into one of three broad categories:

  1. Official recording scheme identifiers – lifetime identifiers allocated to animals by an official recording scheme, typically as part of a traceability or herd improvement programme.
  2. Electronic identifiers – unique numbers carried on a machine-readable tag or chip applied to animals, electronic identifiers are intended to be lifetime identifications (but may in fact be changed or replaced), and may also be required as part of a traceability or herd improvement programme. Electronic identifiers may in some cases also be official identifiers.
  3. Management identifiers – these are typically short-form visual tags or marks applied to animals to make identification easy within a single management unit (herd or farm). There is no guarantee that these identifiers are truly unique within a farm, and they are almost certainly not unique temporally or nationally.

The following are examples of URN notation used for ISO 11784 and GS1 SGTIN identifiers:

  • urn:epc:id:sgtin:3.003700.00542.77346595
  • urn:iso:std:iso:11784:982.009104636715

These are based on name space definitions for EPC (Electronic Product Code) defined in RFC 5134 and for ISO (International Standards Organisation) defined in RFC 5141.

Below are the Animal Tag URN's currently managed by OSPRI:

Herd URN's

Animal Herd URN's

Animal URN's

Animal URN's 1 Animal URN's 2