Persistent identifier

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) can refer to all the information associated with a real object, including its location, or to any of its potential surrogates, e.g. digital images, a museum collection where it belongs, research documents referring to it and other services. PIDs may be applied to real objects as well as to more abstract concepts like services, transformation issues, aggregation or disaggregation of objects and organizations.

PID functional requirements are the following: uniqueness, persistency, resolvability, reliability, authoritativeness, flexibility, interoperability and cost effectiveness.

Noted persistent identifier systems include: Archival Resource Keys (ARKs), Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), Persistent Uniform Resource Locators (PURLs), Uniform Resource Names (URNs), and Extensible Resource Identifiers (XRIs)

Explore further the Linked Heritage learning objects: Persistent Identifier: What if? and Persistent Identifiers: Commercial and heritage views.

See also: Interoperability

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