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How do ARKs differ from DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs?
Here's the short answer. These are all major kinds of persistent identifiers. The short answer is that aside from URNsAmong them, ARKs are the only mainstream, non-siloed, non-paywalled identifiers that you can register to create in about 24 hours. 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 expand upon that answer?
Is there a longer answer to that question?
First, let's dispense with what these identifiers have in common. Their resolvers all forward using ordinary web redirection and they have These identifiers all work fine with forwarding by resolvers. They also have very similar structure. In these hypothetical examples,
https://n2t.net/ark:/99999/12345
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https://handle.net/10.99999/12345
https://purl.org/99999/12345
https://n2t.net???/urn:99999:12345
there's always the protocol (https://) plus a hostname, followed by the Name Assigning Authority (99999 or , 10.99999, or purl.org), which is the organization that created the identifiers. Finally there's the name, or local identifier, that it assigned (12345).
Here are some ways in which ARKs, DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs differ. This is by no means an exhaustive So how do these identifiers differ? Here's a short list.
- 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 such silos with ARKs and URNs, for which 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 such paywalls for ARKs, PURLs, and URNs.
- It is hard to generalize how people use these identifiers. DOIs, for example, used to be known primarily as identifiers for scientific and scholarly publications, with a mature community and service offering around "Crossref DOIs", but since 2013 enough new assigners have joined that it is hard to make generalizations about DOIs.
- 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 For URNs there is no single global resolver for URNs.Strong principles of openness prevented n2t.net, which was built for ARKs, , and in order to register as a Name Assigning Authority you must apply for a URN namespace.
Don't they differ in metadata flexibility, content negotiation, inflections, and suffix passthrough?
Only one resolver, n2t.net, supports all of these features, and it does so for any identifier stored with appropriate metadata. Contrary to popular belief, identifiers don't do anything – it's their resolvers that do or don't support these features. For example, suffix passthrough is a feature supported by n2t.net and purl.org ("partial redirect"), but not by doi.org or handle.net.
By metadata flexibility is meant the ability to store any metadata you want, including repeated elements, such as multiple authors and forwarding URLs, or no metadata at all.
Content negotiation is way for software to request descriptions of things that are not already in formats that might represent descriptions. Fortunately, to request descriptions without restriction, humans (and software) can use inflections, exemplified by the '?' in the first answer.
What exactly is the N2T (n2t.net) resolver?
N2T.net was originally built for ARKs. N2T stands for Name-to-Thing because it was meant to be a very generic resolver. Strong values of openness prevented it 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
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counter-silo principle is
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also found in micro-service tools such as "noid",
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which was built for ARKs
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but is routinely used by organizations
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that mint ARKs and those that mint Handles.
I've heard of ORCIDs and UUIDs – where do they fit in?
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