A High-Performance Persistent Identifier Management Protocol

Abstract

Persistent identifiers are well acknowledged for providing an abstraction for addresses of research datasets. However, due to the explosive growth of research datasets the view onto the concept of persistent identification moves towards a much more fundamental component for research data management. The ability of attaching semantic information into persistent identifier records, in principle enables the realization of a virtual global research data network by means of persistent identifiers. However, the increased importance of persistent identifiers has at the same time led to a steadily increasing load at persistent identifier systems. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to propose a high performance persistent identifier management protocol. In contrast to the DNS system, persistent identifier systems are usually subjected to bulky registration requests originating from individual research data repositories. Thus, the fundamental approach in this work is to implement a bulk registration operation into persistent identifier systems. Therefore, in this work we provide an extended version of the established Handle protocol equipped with a bulk registration operation. Moreover, we provide a specification and an efficient data model for such a bulk registration operation. Finally, by means of a comprehensive evaluation, we show the profound speedup achieved by our extended version of the Handle System. This is also highly relevant for various other persistent identifier systems, which are based on the Handle System.