For Identifiers (just the complete URI and local part, not about mechanisms)

#permanent

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.

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

#resolvable through a web browser

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 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.

#unique within our PID system without the DNS name portion of the

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.

#works with existing systems

The PIDS should work with existing systems such as VIVO, arXiv, OAIS (CUL), Voyager Catalog, and WorldCat etc.

#Simplicity

Please add comments about this goal.

#support for a local namespace prefix and an identifier part

The hope is that the URL can be of the form http://hostname.com/localNamespacePrefix/identifierPart or something similar. The localNamespacePrefix could also be called a collectionPrefix. The resolver system should place no additional restrictions on the identifierPart beyond conforming URL syntax.

#support for opaque identifiers

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. Since the resolver system places no additional restrictions on the identifier part, we cannot stop systems from requesting new identifiers with a syntax that they attach meaning to.

Ex. A collection administrator might register the following Identifiers: http://resolver.cornell.edu/170/article23332 -> http://collectionX.cornell.edu/article/23332 http://resolver.cornell.edu/170/article23332.pdf -> http://collectionX.cornell.edu/article/23332?format=pdf http://resolver.cornell.edu/170/article23332.tex -> http://collectionX.cornell.edu/article/23332?format=tex
The resolver system will not attempt to parse these identifiers and will not record or track relationships between identifiers.