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The PID system should provide long term support for resolving identifiers. The hope is that groups at Cornell and outside of Cornell will be able to use these identifiers to signify digital items, concepts, and other things in a stable maner. The reason to persue this goal is to reduce the cost of creating systems at Cornell that can refer to things created by other systems.
#permanently resolve to a digital object
The Identifiers should be permanently resolvable via HTTP to a digital resource. The bits that comprise the digital resource may change. It
A large catagory of items that a PID resolver at CUL would index would be digital objects that should remain fixed but it is not a goal of the PID resolver system to ensure fixity of digital resources. There are also items that are outside of this catagory that the PID resolver should also work with.
We may want to have identifiers for digital objects that constantly change. We may want to have identifiers for digital objects that represent the state of non-digital resources.
#URL
The PIDs should conform to the URL RFC1738
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Since the PIDs are URLs they could be used as the href attribute in an <a> element in HTML. When requested via HTTP GET the response should be a digital object or digital surrogate.
#unique within our PID system without the DNS name portion of the
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