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For anything and everything. ARKs are mostly used to identify digital content, such as genealogical records (FamilySearch), publisher content (Portico), and digitized manuscripts (Gallica), texts (Internet Archive), and museum holdings (Smithsonian). They are also used for datasets, journals, and vocabulary terms (yamz.net, perio.do). One group uses ARKs to identify historical figures (SNAC), and another to identify live customers.
Why would I use ARKs?
- To keep costs down.
- To work with exactly the metadata I want.
- To be able to create identifiers without metadata.
- To use open infrastructure consistent with my organization's values.
- To work with identifiers that evolve, deciding later (perhaps years later) which to publish and which to discard.
- To create one identifier that enables thousands of identifiers to be resolved (N2T's suffix passthrough).
- To integrate with the Data Citation Index ℠ and ORCID researcher profiles.
How does ARK compare to DOI, Handle, PURL, and URN?
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Given how little each scheme gives you, it is wise to consider cost, risk, and philosophy (eg, openness) your values when choosing one.
How do ARKs differ from identifiers like DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs?
The short answer is that ARKs are the only mainstream, non-siloed, non-paywalled identifiers that you can register to 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.
That's not to say that making ARKs persistent persistence is cost- free. Making any identifier persistent burdens you, the provider, with the costs of content management, hosting, monitoring, and forwarding. You can do those things yourself or with help from a vendor. With But with ARKs, just as with URLs, you will not be charged separately for your identifiers and you will not be 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 will 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".
- The envisioned URN resolver was never built, so URNs are currently resolved as URLs, and there is no designated global URN-as-URL resolver. In order to register to create URNs, you must apply for a URN namespace.
- Unlike DOIs and Handles, (a) ARKs don't have any metadata requirements and (b) ARKs that haven't been released into the world can be deleted.
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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 , where it's has something similar called "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. 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 negotiation to request descriptions of things, but human beings can't do it themselves, and it only works for things that are not already in formats that might represent contain 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, at the top of this FAQ. N2T is one of the few resolvers that that does both.
Why doesn't the global ARK resolver (n2t.net) have the word "ARK" in it?
Although N2T (Name-to-Thing) is a resolver originally built for ARKs. Principles , principles of openness prevented N2T it from becoming just another DOI/Handle/PURL-type silo, which all perform the same basic functions. Thus the "global ARK resolver" also resolves DOIs, Handles, PURLs, URNs, and 600 other types of identifier.
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