This is to announce an open source release of a tool for generating unique
persistent digital object names and other identifiers.  The tool, called
"noid" (nice opaque identifier), can be used as a major piece of an overall
identifier strategy no matter which naming scheme you choose (e.g., ARK,
DOI, Handle, LSID, PURL, or URN).  The current noid documentation,

    http://www.cdlib.org/inside/diglib/ark/noid.pdf

is quite technical on the whole, but it does start with a general overview
and a brief tutorial section.  This software release can be found at

    http://search.cpan.org/CPAN/authors/id/J/JA/JAK/Noid-0.422.tar.gz

Motivation for persistent identifiers and for ARKs can be found at

    http://www.cdlib.org/inside/diglib/ark/arkcdl.pdf

Noid summary:

    The "noid" (rhymes with Freud) tool creates minters, or identifier
    generators, and accepts commands that operate them.  Once created,
    a minter can produce persistent, globally unique names for documents,
    databases, images, vocabulary terms, etc.

    Properly managed, minted identifiers can be used as long term durable
    information object references within naming schemes such as ARK, PURL,
    URN, DOI, and LSID.  At the same time, alternative minters can be set
    up to produce short term names; for example, transaction identifiers
    and compact web server session keys (cf. UUIDs).  These are some of
    the ways in which the California Digital Library is using noids.

    A minter can bind arbitrary metadata to identifiers with individual
    stored values or rule-based values.  Included are instructions for
    setting up a URL interface and a name resolver.  Based on open source
    Berkeley DB databases, minters are extremely fast, scalable, reliable,
    and easy to create, and they have a small technical footprint.

Comments are welcome.

-John


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John A. Kunze                 [log in to unmask]     California Digital Library
415 20th St, 4th Floor      +1 510 987 9231     University of California
Oakland, CA  94612-3550     fax:510 893 5212     Office of the President
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