Referent Tracking for Digital Rights Management

Abstract. Digital Rights Management covers the description, identification, trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of all forms of rights over both tangible and intangible assets, including management of relationships between rights holders in a digital environment. The Digital Object Identifier (DOI) system provides a framework for the persistent identification of content in its broadest interpretation. Although the system has been very well designed to manage object identifiers, some important questions related to the assignment of identifiers are left open. The paradigm of a referent tracking system (RTS) recently advanced in the healthcare and life sciences environment is able to fill these gaps. This is demonstrated by pointing out inconsistencies in the DOI models and by showing how they can be corrected using an RTS.