an ARK is distinguished by the label ark: at the beginning of a path component. When submitted to a web browser, the URL terminated by '?info' (an ARK inflection) returns a metadata record that includes a commitment statement from the current service provider.

Implicit in the design of the ARK scheme is that persistence is purely a matter of service and not a property of a naming syntax. Moreover, that a "persistent identifier" cannot be born persistent, but an identifier from any scheme may only be proved persistent over time.