Purpose

The Technical Working Group (WG) oversees development and maintenance of specifications, software, and servers that support infrastructure for the ARK Alliance (ARKA) community. Examples include ARK standardization, code for counting ARKs, and global resolver replication.

Objectives

1. Standardization. Review the ARK specification so that the authors, who are WG members, can finalize it and submit it to the IETF for publication as an Informational Internet RFC.

2. NAAN procedures. Adapt current CDL procedures for updating NAANs and registering new NAANs so that these maintenance activities can be shared by the community, eg, on github. (The NAAN registry that CDL currently maintains is a text file of globally unique 5-digit Name Assigning Authority Numbers (NAANs) reserved for organizations that wish to assign ARKs.)

3. Global ARK resolver. Guide the development and hosting of the N2T.net resolver.

4. Counting ARKs. Work with the Outreach Working Group to implement mechanisms to measure ARK usage world-wide.

Deliverables

• Kickoff: clarify objectives and assign roles for (a) standardization and (b) NAAN procedures designers; spec authors articulate areas they think are problematic

• Recruit NAAN registry curators
• Design and review '?info' inflection for returning human- and machine-readable metadata
• Establish NAAN request form to generate NAAN entries at N2T
• Submit ARK spec to IETF RFC process and respond to feedback with revisions

• Prototype counting ARKs project

Resources

• 2008 ARK spec: http://n2t.net/e/arkspec.txt

• 2022 ARK spec: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-kunze-ark-34

• Current NAAN registry: https://n2t.net/e/pub/naan_registry.txt

• Global ARK (and other identifiers) resolver, N2T (Name-to-Thing): https://n2t.net

• Notes from ARK "Experts" meetings in 2018, with discussions of surveys, ARK spec changes, counting ARKs, sustainability, etc

• Outreach WG and Sustainability WG

• General WG features common across ARKA working groups

• Persistence Statements: Describing Digital Stickiness:   https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-039

Working Group Members

• Emmanuelle Bermes BnF

• Bertrand Caron BnF

• Tom Creighton Family Search 
• Karen Hanson Portico
• Greg Janée UC Santa Barbara

• John Kunze chair, California Digital Library

• Roxana Maurer National Library of Luxembourg
• Curtis Mirci University of Utah
• Mark Phillips University of North Texas
• Amir Alwash HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Western Switzerland
• Dave Vieglais vice-chair, Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, University of Kansas
• Donny Winston Polyneme LLC

Meeting Times

Teleconferences are generally held once a month, 08:00-09:00 San Francisco time, on the second Tuesday. Connection details included in calendar invitations.

Communication Channels

arka-technical-wg@googlegroups.com, archived at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/arka-technical-wg

IETF discussion list: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ark

Agendas and Notes

Generate new Agenda/Notes link