Digital Object Identifiers

The Digital Object Identifier (DOI(r)) is a system which provides a mechanism to interoperably identify and exchange intellectual property in the digital environment. It provides an extensible framework for managing intellectual content based on proven standards of digital object architecture and intellectual property management. The International DO1 Foundation, a nonprofit membership-based organization, manages development, policy, and licensing of the DO1 system. Interoperability in a networked environment requires resolution, structured metadata and social infrastructure to ensure interoperability between processes, within and between organisations, through the use of open standards to offer cost savings. Many of the issues which we have encountered in developing the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system are common to TAGA's considerations (TAGA, 2002), especially as we move into a multi-media, open standards world. Interoperability and the solutions to it - such as separation of the problem into components, and the recognition that persistence is fundamentally a social infrastructure as well as a technology infrastructure problem - have been fundamental design principles of information identifiers that influenced DO1 (Paskin, 1999) Equally, the importance of unique identification has been widely recognised by the information content communities (Sundt, 1997) and computer scientists (Svenonius, 2000).