Inflections vs Linked Open Data

[pbinkley]

We're looking at ARKs as a possible improvement to our current local identifiers, and I'm trying to get a sense of how they're being used. One question is the use of inflections (the urls with ? and ?? at the end to fetch ERC records). It appears that many major ARK users haven't implemented this. I'd be interested in hearing whether others are seeing use of this feature: are these records being harvested or viewed? 

And is there discussion of developing a new version of the ARK spec that would replace inflections with linked open data? There's nothing to prevent us offering LOD from ARK urls (as BnF is doing, I believe), but it would seem to be a more modern fit for the problem of offering summary machine- and human-readable metadata, and in particular to express the maintenance commitment in a standard way.

Thanks to anyone who cares to take the time to help educate me on this stuff!

Peter

Digital Initiatives Technology Librarian

University of Alberta

[Ron]

We are planning to use DOIs and ARKs in our repository (RUcore).  At this point, the plan is to assign DOIs to object resources (each resource is a Fedora object).  Each object encapsulates multiple file datastreams.  We would like to use inflections and assign ARKs to each file datastream.  I would be interested in what others are doing and an update on the status of inflections for ARKs.

Ron Jantz
Digital Library Architect
Rutgers University Libraries