Problem
Long-term access to objects and items of interest to researchers, scholars, collectors, and others, is notoriously difficult to ensure. People and things move and links rot.
Persistent linking systems are available, but expensive.
And, those systems impose their own metadata and other requirements, instead of letting users supply their own.
ARKs provide long-term access to information objects.
ARKs are affordable: there are no fees to assign or use ARKs. And, you can host ARKs on your own web server for example, with help from the Noid (Nice Opaque Identifiers) open source software.
ARKs are flexible: In some ways, ARKs can be thought of as a “one-size-fits-all,” in that they perfectly fit simple as well as complex use cases.
Familiarity with specification review process (similar to scholarly peer review process)
Experience with community outreach, ability to execute a communications plan and ensure continuous level of activity that promotes and involves the community while ensuring prompt response to issues
Ability to analyze workflows and create scripts to automate routine system functions
Software development skills in current N2T technologies (Perl, MongoDB, Bash)
Ability to learn existing systems/architectures and add incremental improvements
Financial or hardware support for the community from participating organizations/individuals
Target audience and early adopters
ARK identifiers offer affordable, flexible long-term access to global cultural and scientific heritage.
Unique features:
Implementations can consist mostly of off-the-shelf technologies.
ARKs pioneered persistence statements that can reflect variations in persistence policy, including a limited lifespan.
Open infrastructure: unlike other persistent identifiers, ARKs don't lock you into one specific, often fee-based, management and resolution infrastructure.
ARK syntax uniquely supports relationship analyses of groups of ARKs, as might be conducted over search results to make collapsing or expanding them fast and powerful.
“Inflections”: special characters (?, ??) at end of an ARK string will bring back an ARK’s metadata. This means you don’t need a programmer’s help.
“Suffix passthrough”: a special technique that allows you to register one ARK to have usable persistent links to thousands of your objects. This means a huge savings in time and attention for you!
*The development of this statement was based on materials and instruction for the Open Canvas exercise published by the Mozilla Foundation: http://bit.ly/2ES416M