Ethical issues report data type should be changed to string

[ValentinFutterer]

Currently the data type is URI. However, European ethics committees usually give reference numbers for their reports, which cannot be used within a URL, such as https://ethics-commitee/reports?reference_number=xxxxxxxx, where xxxxxxxx would be the number. Such services are not provided by the committees. Therefore, we should change the format to string, as there is no benefit in enforcing a URI format.

[MarekSuchanek]

This seems like ethical_issues_report should be actually some identifier following the structure we have elsewhere (ID with value and type). If we just make this string, and there is a reference number, we do not allow to capture what kind of identifier it is, right?

In any case, I think this could be a breaking change as systems might rely on this being URL (e.g. rendering it as a link).

[ValentinFutterer]

I dont know exact details, but the people I talked to told me, that these numbers dont necessarily follow standards we can use as identifier type. Seems like everyone does their own thing. We would have to collect all the different identifier types from the commissions, or we just use "other" to capture all irregular ones.

If we keep the number as string, you could use built in URL checks in the tools to decide, if it should be rendered as a URL or not (although this would still be breaking).

If we use the ID + type approach, we would need to store some kind of information on how to build an URL out of the ID, if we want to keep this functionality. If we make this field a string, the tools would be responsible for guiding users to input this number as an URL.

Both solutions dont seem very "clean" to me, and the decision might require more info from the ethic commissions on how they structure their identifiers.

About the breaking change: The datatype beforehand was URI, which would have allowed for URNs - although this could be a little pedantic, since I think everyone understood this datatype as URL.