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Here's the short answer. These are all major kinds of persistent identifiers. Among them, ARKs are the only mainstream, non-siloed, non-paywalled identifiers that you can register to create use 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.
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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. N2T has full metadata flexibility, while Crossref and DataCite have specific requirements (eg, the DataCite schema) to create their DOIs.
Content negotiation is a way for software to request descriptions of things that are not already in formats that might represent descriptions. Fortunately, to request descriptions without restriction, both humans ( and software ) can use inflections, exemplified by the '?' in the first answer. Backed by the right metadata, N2T is one of the few that does both.
What exactly is
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N2T (n2t.net)
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?
N2T.net was is a resolver originally built for ARKs. N2T stands for Name-to-Thing because it was meant to be a very generic resolver. Strong 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 counter-silo principle is also found in micro-service tools such as noid, which was built for ARKs but is routinely used by organizations that mint ARKs and those that mint Handles.
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