PILIN Project Outputs : Business Requirements & Service Specifications

Outputs of the PILIN and PILIN ANDS projects, and related material produced by the PILIN team subsequently.

PILIN Stage 1 project outputs are linked to the original project website, but if that output has been superseded, the new output is listed here as well.

Outputs are coded to each of the three stages:

  • 1 PILIN 1 = PILIN project proper
  • 2 PILIN 2 = PILIN ANDS Transition project
  • 3 PILIN 3 = Subsequent Outputs
  • *Asterisked content has not yet been finalised or approved

Each output is followed by the Handle for the work (which resolves to the latest published version).


Business Requirements & Service Specifications
Use Cases for Persistent Identifiers 1
These documents contain User Scenarios for use by stakeholders of identifiers, gathered from conversations with stakeholders and existing literature. PILIN has extracted abstract use cases based on these use scenarios, and used them to model the range of functionality provided by identifier management systems.
Identifier Reporting 2 hdl:102.100.272/T31SNDTRH
Requirements and scoping of service to report to a manager the Handle identifiers they are responsible for, and to search for salient subsets of those identifiers (most/least recently updated, matching domain or path fragment). Uses the SRU/CQL query language, and provides sorting and logging.
Link-Rot Checking 2 hdl:102.100.272/MWWMPDTRH
Requirements and scoping of service to identify broken links for Handle identifiers on a server (instances of "link rot"). Checks all URL and HS_ALIAS fields, with error message in SOAP fault syntax, using HTTP status codes to represent reasons for failure. Maps FTP and Handle status codes to HTTP status codes for consistency.
Validate Association service (Checksum Checking) 2 hdl:102.100.272/ZDQ0QDTRH
Requirements and scoping of service to add a checksum to the Handle record for a digital object, and to check what the Handle currently resolves to against that checksum. Is used to establish the integrity of the association between identifier and thing identifier, i.e. that the object has not been altered or swapped with another object since the checksum was added (the association was "frozen").
Namespace Management 2 hdl:102.100.272/LZ8RQDTRH
Requirements of services for managing namespaces of Handle identifiers (i.e. Local Handle Servers) under a national identifier providers. Includes registering namespaces, reporting namespaces, forming federations of namespaces (which take over aggregate services), archiving namespaces, discovering namespaces, enable user escalation of namespace queries, test deployment, and stakeholder alerts. Proposes a minimum of metadata about namespaces required to implement namespace management.
Archival Resolver 2 hdl:102.100.272/JY69SDTRH [Redraft in progress]
Requirements and scoping of services to deal with identifiers which are no longer active. Allows identifiers to remain informative to users, even if the object they identify is no longer online, and ultimately even if the identifier host is no longer being maintained. (In the latter case, the user can still be referred to the last known authority for the identifier.) Includes potential services to satisfy requirements: Register Archival Metadata (for Handle); Resolve Archived Identifier; Archive Identifier; Register Namespace Authority Metadata ("Last Known Authority").
Migration Services for Identifiers 2 hdl:102.100.272/504RSDTRH
Outlines options for a national identifier service dealing with persistent identifiers in different identifier schemes, so that the persistence guarantee can still be honoured (e.g. a Handle-based national identifier service dealing with legacy PURLs from one of its clients). Options include: supporting all identifier schemes centrally; archiving identifiers in legacy schemes; supporting legacy scheme resolution only on behalf of inactive hosts; dynamically mapping between identifier schemes; migrating from legacy identifier schemes; using an abstract common identifier scheme; or refusing support to legacy schemes.
REST Services for Identifiers (CRUD) 2 hdl:102.100.272/VNP5TDTRH
Proposed interface for REST services to create, read (resolve), update and delete Handle identifiers. Includes discussion of REST-compliant authorisation, and using REST to expose Identifier Reporting via SRU. 2
Persistent Citation Resolver Service 1
Resolves non-persistent identifiers back to their persistent counterparts; in this case, resolves URLs which have been published for a resource, back to the corresponding Handle as the preferred citation for the resource.