Persistent Identifiers and Their Limitations in a Dynamic Web

Authors

Silveira M.D., Pruski C.

Reference

CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 3235, 2022

Description

The trend in the internet is to publish more data enriched with semantic descriptions (e.g., FAIR metadata) and contextual links (e.g., Knowledge graphs), evolving from connected facts to a complete knowledge about digital objects. Persistent identifiers (PID) play an important role in this environment by providing long-lasting and unique identifiers for these digital objects, enabling FAIRness, and facilitating disambiguation and connection between them. However, PIDs are static while digital objects can be dynamic, which constraints the scenario where PIDs can be adopted without potentially generating misinterpretation of the status of the digital objects. In this paper, we analyze the limitations of existing PID approaches and we discuss the needs for dealing with dynamic environments. This discussion drove our proposal of the Persistent and Time-unique Identifier (PTID), that adds temporal information into PIDs and has an hierarchical structure to store versions of dynamic digital objects. We also present the impact of using PTID to the maintenance process of knowledge graphs.