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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 ordinary redirection built in to web servers since 1994 and provided for free by hundreds of URL shortening services.
- A non-trivial fraction of each scheme's identifiers will fail permanently, requiring forwarding to "tombstone" pages.
Given how little each scheme gives you, it is wise to consider cost, risk, and philosophy (eg, openness) when choosing one.
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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".
- No standard URN resolver was ever implemented, so URNs are currently resolved as if they were URLs. There is also no single global resolver for URNs-as-URLs. 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 and ARKs that haven't been released into the world can be deleted.
When should I use ARKs compared to DOIs, Handles, PURLs, and URNs?
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