You might be interested in the 2017 McMurry et al. paper on “Identifiers
for the 21st century: How to design, provision, and reuse persistent
identifiers to maximize utility and impact of life science data”:
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2001414 They address many other
identifier schemes that are in widespread use, including ARKs and CURIEs of
various flavors. Anecdotally, it seems to me that the vast majority of
cited data identifiers are of the RRID variety because it has had a longer
history in the life sciences and the rest of us are just starting to catch
up. Journals certainly accept them. And identifiers.org is a really
amazing resolver a sit handles most of the common identifier formats.
Matt
—
Matthew B. Jones
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0077-4738
Director of Informatics R&D
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
University of California Santa Barbara
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/ecoinfo
PI, NSF Arctic Data Center
https://arcticdata.io
Director, DataONE program
https://dataone.org

Thanks for the link to this interesting article.
Looking at it I found a lot of material on Digital Identifiers of Objects
(DIOs), but no mention at all of Identifiers for Digital Objects (IDOs),
so I think it could be interesting for this list to look at the following
article that explains the distinction between DIOs and IDOs in details:
Roberto Di Cosmo, Morane Gruenpeter, Stefano Zacchiroli
“Identifiers for Digital Objects: the Case of Software Source Code Preservation”
iPRES 2018 – 15th International Conference on Digital Preservation, 2018
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01865790
You may also look at n2t.org that is a metaresolver quite similar to
identifiers.org, with a shorter prefix 🙂
—
Roberto
—
Roberto Di Cosmo
——————————————————————
Computer Science Professor
(on leave at INRIA from IRIF/University Paris Diderot)
Director
Software Heritage E-mail : ***@***.***
INRIA Web : http://www.dicosmo.org
Bureau C123 Twitter : http://twitter.com/rdicosmo
2, Rue Simone Iff Tel : +33 1 80 49 44 42
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Tweets by rdicosmo

Hello Matthew,
IMO DOI is a brand that took on and handles are one type of technology for
persistent identifiers. Actually DOI is based on handle technology. But how
to explain this?
And then there is ARK, EPIC, .. etc. Requirements differ a bit, services by
external organisations are not the same all over and whatever you have to
organise yourself to make it all work will differ.
Please check out: https://www.project-freya.eu/en
Best, Christina Elsenga

Hi Christina,
DOI, ARK, etc. etc. are all systems of DIOs (digital identifiers for objects)
whose core technical underpinning is an architecture built around a (logically unique)
registry associating a potentially meaningless (some say “opaque”) identifier
with a meaning (usully, but not always, the URL of a “landing page” describing
the object).
As a consequence, as clearly stated in the RFC for the Handle System [1],
“persistence” is not an intrinsic property of DIOs, but a function of administrative care.
All systems of DIOs are not born equal: for example, ARKs are technically
superior when it comes to designating versions, subparts or variants of a
digital object, as the syntactic structure of ARK identifiers allows to do this
in a natural way.
The reason why one particular system becomes popular and overshadows the others
is usually a quite interesting subject for social sciences and economics, more
than technical virtue: we are all still using today QWERTY keyboards that slow
us down, and I had to spend quite a few years when I was younger writing code
that had to cope with 64KB memory segments in the x86 processor family (really, that
was masochisms :-)).
AFAICT, DOI have been pushed forward by scientific printing houses when they had
to undergo their digital transformation, while ARKs are today extremely popular
among librarians, and from what I see these two communities could really benefit
from increased cross fertilisation.
On the other side, IDOs (Identifiers for Digital Objects), which are extremely
popular in the software development community, are fundamentally different from
DIOs and seem very little known in both of the above mentioned communities, and
so I hope you will not mind if I keep pointing every now and then to the key
article we ended up publishing in iPres 2018 to contribute to clarify these
issues and build bridges among the different communities [2].
Cheers
—
Roberto
[1] “The only operational connection between a handle andthe entity it names is
maintained within the Handle System. This of course does not guarantee
persistence, which is a function of administrative care.”
S. Sun, L. Lannom, and B. Boesch. 2003. Handle System Overview. RFC 3650.
[2] see https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01865790 for a discussion
——————————————————————
Computer Science Professor
(on leave at INRIA from IRIF/University Paris Diderot)
Director
Software Heritage E-mail : ***@***.***
INRIA Web : http://www.dicosmo.org
Bureau C123 Twitter : http://twitter.com/rdicosmo
2, Rue Simone Iff Tel : +33 1 80 49 44 42
CS 42112
75589 Paris Cedex 12
——————————————————————
GPG fingerprint 2931 20CE 3A5A 5390 98EC 8BFC FCCA C3BE 39CB 12D3

Tweets by rdicosmo

Dear Matt, all,
The initiative « Group of European Experts in RDA » produced a document where the question DOIs / URIs / Other? is discussed, together with other key issues on assigning Persistent Identifiers: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1116189
All the best,
Carlo.