Archival Resource Key

The ARK scheme proposes that “persistence is purely a matter of service,… neither inherent in an object nor conferred on it by a particular naming syntax.” The most an identifier could do to solve the problem of persistence, then, was to indicate an organization’s commitment. Accordingly, in the ARK standard, identifiers would refer not only to a web resource, but also to “a promise of stewardship” and metadata about the resource. If a web server was queried with an ARK, it should return the resource itself or some surrogate for it, such as “a table of contents instead of a large complex document.” If a question mark was appended to the ARK, though, it should return a description—metadata—instead, which “must at minimum answer the who, what, when, and why questions concern an expression of the object.”