Crossregistry

Crossregistry is a concept in data management describing mechanisms for linking, sharing, and querying data that reside in multiple registries. It enables a unified view or collaboration across separately managed registries.

Key elements of crossregistry include standards for data modeling and metadata, APIs for access, and governance to manage consent, privacy, and security. Important activities are data model alignment, schema mapping, and identity resolution to reconcile records that refer to the same entity.

Architectures for crossregistry vary. They can be federated registries, where queries are executed across registries without moving data; centralized brokers that consolidate data from multiple sources; or replicated or mirrored registries where subsets are synchronized to support faster access and offline use.

Common use cases span healthcare registries, product or vehicle registries, domain name registries, and government or NGO registries. Crossregistry enables deduplication, verification, provenance tracking, and enhanced analytics by providing broader visibility while preserving domain-specific governance.

Challenges include data quality and completeness, privacy and consent management, differing legal regimes, access control, latency, and versioning. Successful crossregistry initiatives require formal governance agreements, clearly defined data sharing policies, and ongoing stewardship to maintain accuracy and trust.

Related concepts include data interoperability, identity federation, and cross-registry standards. Some initiatives implement REST or other API-based interfaces and adopt common vocabularies or ontologies to facilitate mapping and interoperability across registries.