Persistent Identifiers for Scholarly Assets and the Web: The Need for an Unambiguous Mapping

Persistent IDentifiers (PIDs) such as DOIs, Handles, ARK identifiers play a significant role in the identification of a wide variety of assets that are created and used in scholarly endeavours, including research papers, datasets, images, etc. Motivated by concerns about long-term persistence, among others, PIDs are minted outside the information access protocol of the day, HTTP. Yet, value-added services targeted at both humans and machines routinely assume or even require resources identified by means of HTTP URIs in order to make use of off-the-shelf components like web browsers and servers. Hence, an unambiguous bridge is required between the PIDoriented paradigm that is widespread in research communication and the HTTP-oriented web, semantic web and linked data environment. This paper describes the problem, and a possible solution towards defining and deploying such an interoperable bridge.