Towards persistent resource identification with the uniform resource name

The exponential growth of the Internet, and the subsequent reliance on the resources it connects, has exposed a clear need for an Internet identifier which remains accessible over time. Such identifiers have been dubbed persistent identifiers owing to the promise of reliability they imply. Persistent naming systems exist at present, however it is the resolution of these systems into what Kunze, (2003) calls persistent actionable identifiers which is the focus of this work. Actionable identifiers can be thought of as identifiers which are accessible in a simple fashion such as through a web browser or through a specific application. This thesis identifies the Uniform Resource Name (URN) as an appropriate identification scheme for persistent resource naming. Evaluation of current URN systems finds that no practical means of global URN resolution is currently available. Two ,new approaches to URN resolution, unique in their use of the Domain Name System (DNS) are introduced. The proposed designs are assessed according to their Usability, Security and Evolution and an implementation described for an example URN namespace of language identifiers

Identification Schemes for Digital Resources

This paper discusses the various naming and addressing systems used to identify and locate resources in the digital environment. There are various schemes that have been developed for this purpose, like, URL, URN, URC schemes developed by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), PURL developed at OCLC. The publishing industry also has developed the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which is being used for rights management of intellectual property. The specifications and the working of URLs, URNs, PURLs, Handles and DOIs are discussed in detail in this paper

Specification for expressing resource capabilities (AARC-G027)

This document provides a specification for expressing resource-specific capabilities using entitlements. A capability defines the resource or child-resource a user is allowed to access, optionally specifying certain actions the user is entitled to perform. Capabilities can be used to convey - in a compact form - authorisation information

Guidelines on expressing group membership and role information

This document standardises the way group membership information is expressed. It defines a URN-based identification scheme that supports: indicating the entity that is authoritative for each piece of group membership information; expressing VO membership and role information; representing group hierarchies

Recursively invoking Linnaeus: A Taxonomy for Naming Systems

Naming is a central element of a distributed or network system design. Appropriate design choices are central. This paper explores a taxonomy of naming systems, and engineering tradeoffs as an aid to the namespace designer. The three orthogonal components of the taxonomy are the characteristics of the namespace itself, name assignment, and name resolution. Within each of these, we explore a number of distinct characteristics. The position of this paper is that engineering design of naming systems should be informed by the possibilities and tradeoffs that those possibilities represent. The paper includes a review of a sampling of naming system designs that reflect different choices within the taxonomy and discussion about why those choices were made.This effort was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Air Force Research Laboratory, Air Force Materiel Command, USAF, under agreement number F30602-00-2-0553

BioGUID: resolving, discovering, and minting identifiers for biodiversity informatics

Background: Linking together the data of interest to biodiversity researchers (including specimen records, images, taxonomic names, and DNA sequences) requires services that can mint, resolve, and discover globally unique identifiers (including, but not limited to, DOIs, HTTP URIs, and LSIDs). Results: BioGUID implements a range of services, the core ones being an OpenURL resolver for bibliographic resources, and a LSID resolver. The LSID resolver supports Linked Data-friendly resolution using HTTP 303 redirects and content negotiation. Additional services include journal ISSN look-up, author name matching, and a tool to monitor the status of biodiversity data providers. Conclusion: BioGUID is available at http://bioguid.info/. Source code is available from http://code.google.com/p/bioguid/

Guidelines for expressing group membership and role information (AARC-G069)

Information about the groups a user is a member of is commonly used by relying parties in order to authorise user access to protected resources. This document provides guidelines for expressing group membership and role information across AARC BPA-compliant AAI services. Specifically, it defines a URN namespace for expressing this information using common identity federation protocols, namely SAML and OpenID Connect/OAuth2

Naming and Addressing Conventions for Digital Resources

This paper discusses the various naming and addressing systems used to identify and locate resources in the digital environment. there are various schemes that have been developed for this purpose, like, URL, URN, URC schemes developed by the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force), PURL developed at OCLC. The publishing industry also has developed the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which is being used for rights management of intellectual property. The specifications and the working of URLs, URNs, URCs, PURLs, and DOIs are discussed in detail in this paper

Globally Distributed Object Identification for Biological Knowledge Bases

The World-Wide Web provides a globally distributed communication framework that is essential for almost all scientific collaboration, including bioinformatics. However, several limits and inadequacies have become apparent, one of which is the inability to programmatically identify locally named objects that may be widely distributed over the network. This shortcoming limits our ability to integrate multiple knowledgebases, each of which gives partial information of a shared domain, as is commonly seen in bioinformatics. The Life Science Identifier (LSID) and LSID Resolution System (LSRS) provide simple and elegant solutions to this problem, based on the extension of existing internet technologies. LSID and LSRS are consistent with next-generation semantic web and semantic grid approaches. This article describes the syntax, operations, infrastructure compatibility considerations, use cases and potential future applications of LSID and LSRS. We see the adoption of these methods as important steps toward simpler, more elegant and more reliable integration of the world’s biological knowledgebases, and as facilitating stronger global collaboration in biology

Biodiversity informatics: the challenge of linking data and the role of shared identifiers

A major challenge facing biodiversity informatics is integrating data stored in widely distributed databases. Initial efforts have relied on taxonomic names as the shared identifier linking records in different databases. However, taxonomic names have limitations as identifiers, being neither stable nor globally unique, and the pace of molecular taxonomic and phylogenetic research means that a lot of information in public sequence databases is not linked to formal taxonomic names. This review explores the use of other identifiers, such as specimen codes and GenBank accession numbers, to link otherwise disconnected facts in different databases. The structure of these links can also be exploited using the PageRank algorithm to rank the results of searches on biodiversity databases. The key to rich integration is a commitment to deploy and reuse globally unique, shared identifiers (such as DOIs and LSIDs), and the implementation of services that link those identifiers