This document is the Stockholm protocol. It is named after the town where it has been conceived. It enlarges the Guildford protocol to a situation where several authorities are present. An authority should be thought of as a namespace and/or a group of persons that ensures the integrity of the data that is identified by the authority. The authority is not a subject area. Since the work of an authority is normally done by a group of people who share an interest, there is hope that authorities may provide some degree of subject consistency, but that is not the purpose for which they have been designed. That purpose is really to separate the total space of handles into several subspaces that can be managed separately. These authorities may also use their own versions of ReDIF.
The Section 2 introduces that a cross authority level called root. An authority may be run on its own i.e.without using the Stockholm protocol. It is hoped that most authorities will be compatible with this protocol. The criteria for compatibilty are set out in the Section 3.
There is one central site accessible at http://openlib.org/acmes or ftp://openlib.org/acmes. This location will be refered to as ROOT in the following.
At ROOT/auto there are the authority templates for all known authorities. These
are gathered by the root. The authority template is contained in a file named
authority_nameauto.rdf on the authority directory. This is a directory
that has the same name as the authority. Example for a well-known
authority.
RePEc/all/RePEc/RePEcauto.rdf
At ROOT/root there are the directories that the Guildford protocol
suggests. These are central versions of these directories. Authorities are
free to use these version. It is suggested to mirror these files into a
directory root of the ALL archive of the authority. However, static
copies of all important root files should also be kept by each authority.