Archival Resource Keys (ARKs) serve as persistent identifiers, or stable, trusted references for information objects. Among other things, they aim to be web addresses (URLs) that don’t return 404 Page Not Found errors. The ARK Alliance is an open global community supporting the ARK infrastructure on behalf of research and scholarship. End users, especially researchers, rely on ARKs for long term access to the global scientific and cultural record. Since 2001 some 8.2 billion ARKs have been created by over 1000 organizations — libraries, data centers, archives, museums, publishers, government agencies, and vendors. They identify anything digital, physical, or abstract. ARKs are open, mainstream, non-paywalled, decentralized persistent identifiers that can be created by an organization as soon as it is registered with a NAAN (Name Assigning Authority Number). Once registered, an ARK organization can create unlimited numbers of ARKs and publicize them via the n2t.net global resolver or via their own local resolver.

Prefix

ark

Keywords

data management data retrieval subject agnostic

Links

Homepage Repository @arks_org@fosstodon.org

Contact

John Kunze   0000-0001-7604-8041   jkunze

Pattern for Local Unique Identifiers

Local identifiers in Archival Resource Key should match this regular expression:
^/*[0-9A-Za-z]+(?:/[\w/.=*+@\$-]*)?(?:\?.*)?$

Example Local Unique Identifier

/53355/cl010066723   Resolve

Pattern for CURIES

Compact URIs (CURIEs) constructed from Archival Resource Key should match this regular expression:
^ark:/*[0-9A-Za-z]+(?:/[\w/.=*+@\$-]*)?(?:\?.*)?$

Example CURIE

ark:/53355/cl010066723

MIRIAM Namespace Embedded in LUI

The legacy MIRIAM standard for generating CURIEs with this resource annotates the namespaceEmbeddedInLUI as true. This means that you may see local unique identifiers that include a redundant prefix and delimiter (also known as a banana) and therefore look like a CURIE. For , the banana looks like ark:. Therefore, you may see local unique identifiers for this resource that look like ark:/53355/cl010066723 (instead of the canonical form /53355/cl010066723) and CURIEs for this resource that look like ark:ark:/53355/cl010066723 (instead of the canonical form ark:/53355/cl010066723). The Semantic Farm will automatically strip off the banana when standardizing local unique identifiers and CURIEs.

References

• Other https://n2t.net/e/about.html
• GitHub PR https://github.com/biopragmatics/bioregistry/pull/1141

Contributors

• contributor John Kunze   0000-0001-7604-8041   jkunze
• contributor Charles Tapley Hoyt   0000-0003-4423-4370   cthoyt
• contributor Sumir H Pandit   0000-0002-1216-4761   sumirp

The metaregistry provides mappings between the Semantic Farm and other registries. There are 6 mappings to external registries for this resource with 4 unique external prefixes.

A provider turns a local unique identifiers from a resource into a URI. Many providers are also resolvable as URLs (i.e., they can be used in a web browser).

The local unique identifier /53355/cl010066723 is used to demonstrate the providers available for Archival Resource Key. Some providers may use a different example, which is displayed in the table below. A guide for curating additional providers can be found here.