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Persistent Identifiers for Digital Assets (PIDA)

PIDA is a service that provides unique persistent URLs (PURLs) for referencing digital assets on the web. Using our service will help you to ensure that your digital assets remain findable and can be accessed reliably by both humans and machines in the long term.

PIDA is a service offered by the Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) and the Institute for Materials Data Science and Informatics (IAS-9) at Forschungszentrum Jülich.

Why use PIDA for digital assets?

Web addresses and the stability of established links can decay over time, for example, if a digital resource is moved to another location or the domain name of an organization changes. This process is often known as link rot. When users try to access a decayed link, i.e. where the target has moved to a different location, they receive an “404 not found” error instead of the desired web page. This problem can be prevented by using persistent identifiers – such as those provided by PIDA. These long-lasting references to a digital object, such as an article, dataset, video, person, or organization, will persistently identify that object on the internet, regardless of its actual location.

Using a PURL provided by PIDA ensures that:

• a resource can be reliably referenced for future access by humans and software
• links to resources do not break
• resources become more easily discoverable – for example, researchers, their affiliations, and their contributions
• resources are findable – one of the key elements in the FAIR principles of data management
• entities can be identified unambiguously – for example, authors with the same name can be distinguished from one another