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Project summary

INCIPIT (Infrastructure Nationale d’un Complément d’Identifiants Pérennes, Interopérables et Traçables) is a project that runs from January to December 2020 and is funded by the swissuniversities' P-5 programme under the call 192 as well as being co-financed by the Haute école de gestion de Genève (HEG-GE).

INCIPIT will develop a complementary infrastructure for the low-cost attribution of persistent identifiers (PIDs) to any concept or resource based on the Archival Resource Key (ARK) scheme. The aim of the implementation of an ARK allocation service in Switzerland, which the INCIPIT project will initiate at the HEG-GE with the help of the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB), is to cover the needs of the scientific community that requests tailored and flexible services in the broadest sense of the term, first and foremost research data belonging to the long tail and especially by responding to the interests of the cultural heritage field (libraries, archives, museums).

Partners

Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

Project results

Once an organization is registered with INCIPIT, it will be able to create, reserve or modify ARK identifiers via the user interface or the API. Each of these interfaces will be able to generate ARKs through the eggnog software. End users who will trigger actionable ARKs will be redirected to the landing web pages thanks to the Name-To-Thing (N2T) resolver.

INCIPIT will allow organizations to create identifiers with a very fine level of granularity that can reflect complex object hierarchies as well as being able to retain traceability, versioning, or even information on the object's persistence or unavailability. It will also have a non-partisan view of the metadata scheme and will not impose a rigid standpoint but rather offer possibilities to extend the metadata and linking possibilities by enabling organisations to leverage Linked Open Data (LOD) applications.