ePIC Prefix Policy Validation

A tremendous amount of data is generated for scientific work. These data will later be referenced for collaboration with other scientists. The Handle System® is involved at this stage by making the data available to others and resolving Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). Persistent Identifiers permanently point to a video, data, document or any other type of digital object, and their functionality are based on the Handle System®. The majority of PIDs are unique. The digital objects in any PID database are indirectly connected with current state data. The identifier resolution usually happens over DNS and URL systems. A client of the Handle System® software is run on the servers to create the entries in a PID database, which stores the URLs of the data objects. This process is carried out for almost all the customers of Persistent Identifier Consortium for eResearch, where the members cooperate for the Handle System® servers. There is a compelling need to provide the prefix administrators with a descriptive overview in order to verify whether the ePIC prefix policy is followed. Moreover, it should be clear to the members how many prefixes are created, how many primary or mirror instances are available, which service instance provides a mirror for which prefix, what configuration primary and mirror instances have, where primary or mirror instances are located and who the users of the prefixes are. The thesis was submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the course “Applied Computer Science” and was supervised by Prof. Ramin Yahyapour (GWDG) and Dr. Sven Bingert (GWDG).