ARROW and the University of Southern Queensland have established the Persistent Identifier Linking Infrastructure (PLIN) Project.
As outlined in the project’s Executive Summary, its goals are to:
- Support adoption and use of persistent identifiers and shared persistent identifier management services by the project stakeholders.
- Plan for a sustainable, shared identifier management infrastructure that enables persistence of identifiers and associated services over archival lengths of time.
The project’s anticipated outcomes are:
- Best practice and policy guides for the use of persistent identifiers in Australian e-learning, e-research, and e-science communities.
- Use cases describing community requirements for identifiers and business process analysis relating to these use cases.
- E-Framework representations of persistent identifier management services that support the business requirements for identifiers.
- A "pilot" shared persistent identifier management infrastructure usable by the project stakeholders over the lifetime of the project. The pilot infrastructure will include services for creating, accessing and managing persistent digital identifiers over their lifetime. The pilot infrastructure will interoperate with other DEST funded systemic infrastructure. The development phase of the pilot will use an agile development methodology that will allow the inclusion of "value-added" services for managing resources using persistent identifiers to be included in the development program if resources permit.
- Software tools to help applications use the shared persistent identifier infrastructure more easily.
- Report on options and proposals for sustaining, supporting (including outreach) and governing shared persistent identifier management infrastructure
The PLIN Projet will base its work on the CNRI Handle System. The below excerpt from the Handle System home page describes its primary features:
The Handle System® is a general purpose distributed information system that provides efficient, extensible, and secure identifier and resolution services for use on networks such as the Internet. It includes an open set of protocols, a namespace, and a reference implementation of the protocols. The protocols enable a distributed computer system to store identifiers, known as handles, of arbitrary resources and resolve those handles into the information necessary to locate, access, contact, authenticate, or otherwise make use of the resources. This information can be changed as needed to reflect the current state of the identified resource without changing its identifier, thus allowing the name of the item to persist over changes of location and other related state information.
