Decentralized Persistent Identifiers: a basic model for immutable handlers
Miguel‐Ángel Sicilia, Elena García‐Barriocanal, Salvador Sánchez‐Alonso, Juan José Cuadrado-Gallego · Procedia Computer Science · 2019
Persistent Identifier (PID) systems have evolved in the last decade to mitigate the problem of link rot and provide unique and resolvable identifiers for digital objects, becoming a key element in archival services. However, they still depend on centralized services which may either become unavailable or cease to behave or be managed as expected. Decentralized technologies may serve as the infrastructure for the design of a trustless PID system over which other incentive mechanisms may be devised. Here we discuss a basic model for such a novel PID system, based on the capacity of content addressing of current decentralized file systems and the concept and definition of verifiable claims as metadata statements about the existence of an immutable digital resource. An example basic design is described using the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) as supporting infrastructure with a minimal set of conventions, that could be used as an alternate mechanism for storage of byte streams in digital repositories as DSpace or CKAN.