Persistent Identifiers (PID) are the foundation referencing digital assets in scientific publications, books, and digital repositories. In its realization, PIDs contain metadata and resolving targets in form of URLs that point to data sets located on the network. In contrast to PIDs, the target URLs are typically changing over time; thus, PIDs need continuous maintenance - an effort that is increasing tremendously with the advancement of e-Science and the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Nowadays, billions of sensors and data sets are subject of PID assignment. This paper presents a new approach of embedding location independent targets into PIDs that allows the creation of maintenance-free PIDs using content-centric network technology and overlay networks. For proving the validity of the presented approach, the Handle PID System is used in conjunction with Magnet Link access information encoding, state-of-the-art decentralized data distribution with BitTorrent, and Named Data Networking (NDN) as location-independent data access technology for networks. Contrasting existing approaches, no green-field implementation of PID or major modifications of the Handle System is required to enable location-independent data dissemination with maintenance-free PIDs.
In the context of semantic digital archives for archiving data of PIM applications, Haun and Nürnberger proposed a PID schema for accessing objects in file systems using an URN-like Magnet Links scheme @cite_36 . They link the congruent attributes of the Magnet Link scheme to the attributes provided by some PID systems such as global uniqueness, persistence and scalability for the application in offline data archives serving data from archive medium such as file systems on WORM medium. In contrast, our approach relies on currently employed PID systems and incorporates location-independent data access in a distributed online environment using the full-featured Handle PID system.
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Persistent identification is necessary for recognition, dissemination and (external) cross-references to digital objects. Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) provide an established scheme for this task, but do not guarantee stable and persistent identification. In the context of (personal) archives, stability is needed when references are be stored on a medium where later changes to identifiers cannot be corrected at all or only with a very large overhead, such as WORM media or tape archives. Additionally, resources like contacts or appointments do not have a URI, while other URIs, such as file system paths or the IMAP URI, are unstable by design and cannot represent the dynamic aspects of Personal Information Management (PIM). This paper discusses problems of archiving that arise with entity identification in PIM, especially on the example of the personal file system.