DNS as resolution infrastructure for persistent identifiers

Abstract

The concept of persistent identification is increasingly important for research data management. At the beginnings it was only considered as a persistent naming mechanism for research datasets, which is achieved by providing an abstraction for addresses of research datasets. However, recent developments in research data management have led persistent identification to move towards a concept which realizes a virtual global research data network. The base for this is the ability of persistent identifiers of holding semantic information about the identified dataset itself. Hence, community-specific representations of research datasets are mapped into globally common data structures provided by persistent identifiers. This ultimately enables a standardized data exchange between diverse scientific fields. Therefore, for the immense amount of research datasets, a robust and performant global resolution system is essential. However, for persistent identifiers the number of resolution systems is in comparison to the count of DNS resolvers extremely small. For the Handle System for instance, which is the most established persistent identifier system, there are currently only five globally distributed resolvers available. The fundamental idea of this work is therefore to enable persistent identifier resolution over DNS traffic. On the one side, this leads to a faster resolution of persistent identifiers. On the other side, this approach transforms the DNS system to a data dissemination system.