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In several countries, a system for such a persistent identifier has been developed and 'national resolvers' have been set up. A resolver is a transformation and redirection service, transforms a string of characters to an URL, and is hosted by a national organisation. Common identifiers in the case of scholarly communication are DOI, Handle and URN:NBN. In case of DOI and Handle the resolution mechanism is located in the US at CNRI CNRI: http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/. In case of URN:NBN resolution mechanisms are hosted by a national organisation, often this is done by the National Library.

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The differences between Persistent Identifiers are described by Hans-Werner Hilse and Jochen Kothe in Implementing Persistent Identifiers Hilse, H., Kothe, J., Implementing Persistent Identifiers, KNAW, http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/publ/pdf/2732.pdf [Hilse]. There is also an article Persistent Identifiers: Considering the Options Tonkin, E., Persistent Identifers: Considering the Options, Ariadne, issue 56, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/tonkin/ in Ariadne, issue 56 by Emma Tonkin [Tonkin].

Using Persistent Identifiers involves an obligation for the repositories to sustain persistence of the Identifier over a long period of time! This persistence can be guaranteed in so called "trusted repositories" with the appropriate certification. See chapter Annex : Use of Quality Labels page.
for more information see http://www.persistent-identifier.de
and https://www.pilin.net.au/

The Scandinavian countries, Germany, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands are using URN:NBN. The main reason for choosing urns is because it is an internet standard that is future proof. The only drawback now is that a urn is not actionable without using an http resolution address as a prefix. Further work is still needed to be done to integrate URN in the DNS system DNS-URN integration
http://www.persistent-identifier.de/english/335-project-proposal.php#URNscope by using NAPTR records NAPTR Record: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAPTR_record that is also used for VOIP phone calls.

Recently Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have come to a promising proposal for a Global Resolver of Persistent Identifiers (URN:NBN). In cooperation with representatives of the Hopkins and Berkeley Universities (US) a working proof of concept Global Resolution Proof of Concept: http://www.surfgroepen/sites/surfshare/public/software/pihandler of a global resolver (GRRS) has been developed. This GRRS integrates four different national resolvers into one global resolver. The GSRS (n2t.info) receives the Identifier from a browser plug-in and redirects the browser to the appropriate national resolver where the browser again is redirected to the current location of the web resource. The architecture of this multi-system process is depicted below.

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