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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 pursue this goal is to reduce the cost of creating systems at Cornell that can refer to things created by other systems.
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The Identifiers should be permanently resolvable via HTTP to a digital resource.
A large catagory category 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 category that the PID resolver should also work with.
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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. Wrinkle in this goal is that many web browsers do not respect the MIME type of responses. A digital object such as a PDF might need to have the part after the final slash end if .pdf to be interperted interpreted as a PDF file by a browser. Some browsers will attempt to open a result as a PDF file on a GET of a URL like http://resolver.org/234/b233.pdf
that has a reply status of 400.
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