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 subject agnostic

Links

Homepage @ARKsInTheOpen

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 includes the namespaceEmbeddedInLUI as true. The actual part that gets prefixed before the local unique identifier regex, otherwise known as the banana, is ark:. Therefore, you might see local unique identifiers written out as CURIEs.

References

Other https://n2t.net/e/about.html

Contributors

• contributor John Kunze   0000-0001-7604-8041   jkunze
• contributor Charles Tapley Hoyt   0000-0003-4423-4370   cthoyt

The metaregistry provides mappings between the Bioregistry and other registries. There are 4 mappings to external registries for ark with 2 unique external prefixes.

Providers are various services that resolve CURIEs to URLs. The example CURIE ark:/53355/cl010066723 is used to demonstrate the provides available for ark. Generation of OLS and BioPortal URLs requires additional programmatic logic beyond string formatting.