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For a resolver to work, its hostname must be carefully chosen so won't ever need to be changed. Memory organizations, some of them centuries old, tend to have hostnames well-suited to be resolvers. Some well-known, younger resolvers are n2t.net (the ARK resolver), identifiers.org, doi.org, handle.net, and purl.org.
How are ARKs used?
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How does ARK compare to DOI, Handle, PURL, and URN?
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- They all fail to stop the major causes of broken links: loss of funding, natural disaster, war, deliberate removal, human error, and provider neglect.
- They all burden the end provider with the responsibility to update forwarding tables as URLs change.
- They all give access to any kind of thing, whether digital, physical, abstract, person, group, etc.
- They all identify content that is subject to change on future visits.
- They all break regularly and in large numbers (thousands and more).
- They all use very simple ordinary redirection built in to every web server servers since 1994 and provided for free by hundreds of URL shortening services.
- They all (as a result) leave you wondering if you need them at all, and if so, at what cost.
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That's not to say that making ARKs persistent is cost-free. Keeping any identifiers persistent burdens every provider with the costs of content management, hosting, monitoring, and forwarding. You can do those things yourself or with help from a vendor. With ARKs, but just as with ARKs URLs, you are not charged separately for your identifiers and you are not locked in to a special-purpose resolution silo that also locks out other identifiers.
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- When (not if, because all things pass) the
https://protocol and the hostname cease to exist, only ARKs and URNs indicate the type of identifier that remains. - For DOIs, Handles, and PURLs, you are required to use their respective resolvers. ARKs and URNs, permit you to use your own resolver.
- To create DOIs and Handles, you are required to pay a membership fee and, for DOIs, 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 and URNs, all ARKs can be resolved via n2t.net, making it the closest thing to a "global ARK resolver".
- For URNs there is no single global resolver. In order to register to create URNs, you must apply for a URN namespace.
- Unlike DOIs and Handles, ARKs can be deleted and don't have any metadata requirements.
When should I use ARKs compared to DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs?
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