Verifiable digital object identity system

Abstract

Identification is a two part system comprising of a token or label (an identifier) that can be used to reference an entity and a process that can be used to create label-entity associations and verify that the reference and entity belong together. There are a number of identity systems for digital objects that provide identifiers (such as the Handle system, the DOI and URIs). However none of these systems provide verification services. The primary application for our proposed system is in a DRM system, where it is necessary to correctly match users' use licenses to the digital objects covered by the use licenses. In such a case, incorrect associations are effectively failures of the system, and could have wide ranging legal and economic impact, depending on the nature of the protected data.In this paper we present an identity system for digital objects that support verification and the related details such as the identifier format, the verification process as well as a protocol to create identifiers for digital objects.