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A resolver is a website that is especially good at forwarding an incoming identifiers identifier (those the one originally advertised to users) to whatever website is currently best suited to deal with it. To make this it work, the hostname of the resolver itself should be is carefully chosen so that it never has to be changed. Memory organizations, some of them centuries old, tend to have website hostnames that are especially stable and well suited to be as resolvers. Other well-known resolvers include n2t.net, identifiers.org, doi.org, handle.net, and purl.org.
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These are all major kinds of persistent identifiers. The short answer is that aside from URNs, ARKs are the the only mainstream, non-siloed, non-paywalled identifiers. Over 500 registered organizations have created an estimated 3.2 billion ARKs in the world, and no one has ever paid for the right to create them.
Would you
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upon that answer?
Superficially, these These identifiers all work fine with forwarding by resolvers. They also have very similar structure and purpose.xxxxx. In these hypothetical examples,
https://n2t.net/ark:/99999/12345
https://doi.org/10.99999/12345
https://handle.net/10.99999/12345
https://purl.org/99999/12345
https://n2t.net/urn:99999:12345
there's the protocol (https://) plus hostname, followed by the Name Assigning Authority (99999 or 10.99999), which is the organization that created the identifiers. Finally there's the name, or local identifier, that it assigned (12345).
By no means an exhaustive list, here are some ways in which ARKs, DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs differ.
- When (not if, since all things pass) the https:// protocol and the hostname cease to exist, only ARKs and URNs will still indicate the kind of identifier that remains.
- To create DOIs, Handles, and PURLs, you are required to use their respective resolvers. There are no silos with ARKs and URNs; for them you can use your own resolver.
- To create DOIs and Handles, you are also required to pay a membership fee and per-DOI charges. There are no fees for ARKs, PURLs, and URNs.
- Although you can use your own or a vendor resolver for your ARKs, all ARKs can be resolved via n2t.net. Thus n2t.net is the closest thing to a "global ARK resolver".
- There is no single global resolver for URNs.
- Strong principles of openness prevented n2t.net, which was built for ARKs, from becoming just another DOI/Handle/PURL-type silo. As a result, the "global ARK resolver" also resolves DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs, along with 600 other kinds of identifier. This anti-silo approach is exemplified by ARK tools such as "noid", that are routinely used by organizations to mint Handles.
I've heard of ORCIDs and UUIDs – where do they fit in?
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UUIDs are globally unique, 37-character strings that are easy to generate but only become usable as web addresses when made part of a URL, ARK, DOI, etc, for example, in this ARK:
https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/3c2e39526-e0c3-41ae-be4f-07558a9458eb
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