Towards Trusted Identities for Swiss Researchers and their Data

Julien A Raemy,Renã© Martin Schneider

doi:10.2218/ijdc.v14i1.596

Abstract

In this paper we report on efforts to enhance the Swiss persistent identifier (PID) ecosystem. We will firstly describe the current situation and the need for improvement in order to describe in full detail the steps undertaken to create a Swiss-wide model. A case study was undertaken by using several data sets from the domains of art and design in the context of the ICOPAD project. We will provide a set of recommendations to enable a PID service that could mint Archival Resource Key (ARK) identifiers or a flavour of Research Resource Identifiers (RRIDs) as complement to Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). We will conclude with some remarks concerning the transferability of this approach to other areas and the requirements for a national hub for PID management in Switzerland.

Highlights

Persistent Identifers (PIDs) are a necessary tool to assure referenceability and – as their name says – identifability in a bi-unique manner upon which further mechanisms can be built upon, e.g. citability to mention only the probably most important one (Hakala, 2010; Van de Sompel, Sanderson, Shakar and Klein, 2014).Their persistence is a real added value compared to the cool URIs of the Linked Data approach, which is not in opposition to a joint use of both persistent identifer (PID) and Linked Data
It is often forgotten that PIDs encompass a large variety of heterogeneous and ever-growing denominators for which the metaphor of ecosystem seems to be appropriate (see Espasandin, Jaquet and Lefort (2018) for a complete overview), and that the combination of several PIDs bears a high potential for the creation of what are called Trusted Identities in research data management, where their use is primordial both for sharing and archiving data, no matter if the focus is set on open access or long term archival
Archival Resource Key (ARK) identifers are free once you have found an institution that is willing to connect to the California Digital Library (CDL)’s Name Assigning Authority Number (NAAN) registry16, they seem to be the appropriate alternative to the pay-per-ID approach practiced so far in Switzerland;

Summary

Introduction

Persistent Identifers (PIDs) are a necessary tool to assure referenceability and – as their name says – identifability in a bi-unique manner upon which further mechanisms can be built upon, e.g. citability to mention only the probably most important one (Hakala, 2010; Van de Sompel, Sanderson, Shakar and Klein, 2014). ARKs were chosen for the following reasons, to name only a few: ARK identifers are free once you have found an institution that is willing to connect to the California Digital Library (CDL)’s Name Assigning Authority Number (NAAN) registry, they seem to be the appropriate alternative to the pay-per-ID approach practiced so far in Switzerland; ARKs are built using a completely different theoretical model, consisting of a decentral and domain (i.e. DNS) agnostic approach, which allows a considerable freedom for the internal management of the data sets; ARKs allow easy use with LOD – a circumstance that has proven its feasibility in a number of projects, e.g. the data.bnf.fr project for creating a Linked Data application for several data bases hosted by the French National Library (BnF); ARKs can be combined effortlessly with other specifcations, such as the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) canonical URI syntax. Institutions have decided to label this RRID-like identifer as such: The Art and Design Identifer (ADID)

ARK via its own means

ARK via DaSCH

ARK via a national hub

Conclusions and Future Work