Information Technology Reference
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If one were to use this idea then one could allow repositories to die without
notifying anyone. However that is not good for persistence. Moreover of another
repository advertised itself as a replacement for the dead repository then there would
be concerns about the provenance and authenticity of the holdings.
10.3.2.3 Root Name Resolver
The root name resolver needs some special consideration because it is the thing
to which users' applications point and so resolving its location will be integrated
into huge numbers of those applications. Its persistence is therefore of particular
importance.
The funding of that root name resolver could be guaranteed, for example by
some kind of international investment which yields guaranteed continued fund-
ing - perhaps not guaranteed forever but certainly much longer than typical funding
cycles.
This is analogous to the non-digital preservation - cryonics - where
there are commercial companies which offer to freeze a person's head
when they die. The supply of liquid nitrogen is paid for by the interest
on a lump sum of several tens of thousands of dollars paid before
death.
10.3.2.4 Practical Considerations
While the previous sections described a single PID system, there are already many
“Persistent” ID systems in use and it is probably impractical to get everyone to
change what they have in use. One could minimise disruption by, for example,
adopting the most popular PID system to minimise confusion but one would need
to check whether the most popular system can satisfy the full set of requirements -
whatever they are.
It might be possible for the root name resolver to deal with the multitude of PID
systems in order to provide a more homogeneous PID system but this would require
careful analysis.
Another possibility would be to make the PID string more flexible in order to use
several PID systems simultaneously. The concept introduced here follows the adage
“do not put all one's eggs in one basket”. Conceptually one needs to allow multiple
name resolution mechanisms in the hope that at least one survives, in order to get
to the host (or hosts) which hold the digital object. An XML encoding may look
something like:
<pid>
<value>xxxxxxxxxxx
<nameresolver type = n1>http://x.y.z</nameresolver>
<nameresolver type = n2>DOI:123456</nameresolver>
<nameresolver type = n3>urn::xx::dd</nameresolver>
</value>
</pid>
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