GRID

GRID is (was) an open dataset of globally-unique identifiers for research organisations, similar to ORCHID which does the same thing for individual researchers. It was created and maintained by Digital Science & Research Solutions Ltd. and released to address the challenge of inconsistent organisation names across research data and metadata.
Each organisation in GRID is assigned a persistent identifier (a GRID ID, such as grid.225360.0) and associated metadata including name variants, location (geo-coordinates), type of organisation, relationships (parent/child), and external identifiers. 

Why it matters

• It helps with disambiguation of institutions in research metadata: e.g., “University of Somewhere” appears under many name variants, GRID gives one canonical identifier. 
• It supports interoperability of research infrastructure: metadata systems (publications, grants, repositories) can reference the same organisational IDs to link and aggregate data meaningfully. 
• For a lab, institution or researcher: using a recognised organisation ID in your metadata helps ensure your affiliation is clearly identified and linked in global systems (which matters for visibility, analytics, reporting).

How it works (in brief)

1. Organisations were registered/curated in the GRID database with a unique ID, metadata and links to external identifiers. 
2. Metadata for publications, grants, datasets could reference the GRID ID of the institution (or link via other identifiers) so that machine systems can reliably interpret which institution is meant.
3. The complete dataset could be downloaded (in JSON or CSV formats) under CC0 (public domain) licence for reuse. 
4. From 2021 onwards, the public release of GRID was discontinued in favour of the community-driven Research Organization Registry (ROR).