There should be long term support an ID resolution mechanism.
The Identifiers should be permanently resolvable via HTTP to a digital resource. The bits that comprise the digital resource may change. It is not a goal of the PID system to ensure fixity of digital resources.
The PIDs should conform to the URL RFC1738
Since the PIDs are URLs they could be used as the href attribute in an <a> element in HTML.
If the ID schema has a DNS name then all PIDs in the system should be unique even with the DNS name removed. This goal is trivially satisfied if there is only one DNS name used by the PID system. If there are more than one DNS names used in the system care must be taken to ensure that goal is met.
The PIDS should work with existing systems such as VIVO, arXiv, OAIS (CUL), Voyager Catalog, and WorldCat etc.
The hope is that the URL can be of the form http://hostname.com/localNamespacePrefix/identifierPart
or something similar.
In an attempt to avoid problems in situations where the labels associated with resources change, the PIDs should support partially opaque identifiers such as http://hostname.com/170/2a33-ffff
instead of http://hostname.com/SuperMegaCollection/WalterCarlos1
.
To encourage the possibility of using the PIDs across intuitions, the PIDs should not be branded.
The digital resource returned by the PID resolver might not be the thing identified by the PID, but a surrogate for a resource that cannot be transported easily via HTTP.
Please add comments about this goal. How short? Should there be a length limit (which implies a limit to the number of things that can be resolved)?
Please add comments about this goal. Adding dashes between every 4 digits of the identifier may be a way to improve the easy of copying the PIDs.
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This should be satisfied by earlier goals.
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