John Kunze orcid 0000-0001-7604-8041
Education
BA (1982) University of California Berkeley, Mathematics and Computer Science
| 7/22 – | Senior Research Associate − Drexel University |
| 1/14 – 7/22 | Identifier Systems Architect − UCOP CDL |
| 1/10 – 1/14 | Associate Director, UC Curation Center − UCOP CDL |
| 2/03 – 12/09 | Preservation Technologies Architect − UCOP CDL |
| 5/01 – 1/03 | Director of Technical Planning, LNTDL − UCSF CKM and UCOP CDL |
| 5/98 – 4/01 | Consultant, Medical Informatics − UCSF CKM and the NLM |
| 10/95 – 4/98 | Manager, Advanced Tech − Center for Knowledge Management, UCSF |
| 8/94 – 8/95 | Lead programmer/researcher − U.S. National Library of Medicine |
| 9/77 – 9/95 | Programmer/architect − University of California Berkeley |
Technical Contributions
The first metadata standards: primary author of the Dublin Core (DC) metadata specification RFC 5013; founder and chair of the DC Kernel Metadata workgroup; chair of the National Information Standards Organization committee that moved the DC metadata specification to approval as NISO Z39.85 (2001); co-author and editor of the original DC metadata specification, RFC 2413; wrote the spec for encoding Dublin Core in HTML, RFC 2731
URL standards: in the context of the URI working group of the IETF, wrote the URL functional requirements in an attempt to unblock the URL standard, which was at an impasse because the average URL was seen to break after 100 days; the proposed requirements permitted URLs to break and was published as RFC1736, resulting in immediate approval of the first URL standard as RFC1738; coined the term, URC (originally Uniform Resource Citation); led the creation of RFC 2056 describing Z39.50 URLs
Packaging standards: primary author of the BagIt packaging format for disk-based or network-based storage and transfer of generalized content; co-author of the WARC (Web Archive) file format published as ISO 28500:2009; Digital Curation Tools: wrote specs, used in the Oxford Common File Layout and HathiTrust, supporting curation and preservation as microservices rather than monolithic repository systems: Pairtree, Dflat, ReDD, Checkm, Namaste
Dataset and Web Preservation: Preservation and Metadata group on a $20 million NSF DataNet grant; wrote the core service vision in a winning $2 million NDIIPP grant proposal to the Library of Congress to create a web preservation service; participated centrally in the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s specification of permanence levels
ARK Persistent Identifiers: created the ARK (Archival Resource Key) persistent identifier scheme in 2001 to address broken links flexibly and affordably while leveraging the NLM permanence levels; evolved the ARK specification, created the ARK resolver and registration infrastructure, and registered the first 600 ARK organizations; led the creation and growth of the ARK Alliance; by the end of 2025, there were over 1720 ARK organizations, including 12 national libraries, 215 universities, 254 archives, 144 museums, 124 journals, and 59 scientific centers; the non-paywalled ARK identifier is now vital for open knowledge linking across world cultural and scientific institutions, especially in the global South; built a generalized identifier minting, binding, and resolving system (“noid”) and the scheme agnostic Name-To-Thing (N2T) resolver that resolves ARKS and hundreds of other identifier schemes
Search and Operating Systems: in 1999 wrote a new digital library searching and ranking engine for the 40-million-page Legacy National Tobacco Documents Library; at UC Berkeley, wrote, and released the first complete Z39.50 client and server protocol engine; designed, wrote, and maintained UC Berkeley’s first campus wide information system (pre-web, pre-Gopher); wrote programs in S (precursor of the R language) to summarize and plot UNIX 4.2BSD file system kernel traces; wrote software tools that come pre-installed on current Mac and Linux systems
Selected Publications
FAIR Metadata: A Community-Driven Vocabulary Application, Christopher B. Rauch, Mat Kelly, John A. Kunze, Jane Greenberg, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98876-0_16
Lost without context: Representing relationships between archival materials in the digital environment, October 2021, book chapter, https://doi.org/10.25740/GG453CV6438
Internet of Samples (iSamples): Toward an interdisciplinary cyberinfrastructure for material samples, Davies, Deck, Kansa, Kansa, Kunze, Meyer, Orrell, Ramdeen, Snyder, Vieglais, Walls, Lehnert, GigaScience, Volume 10, Issue 5, May 2021, giab028, https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giab028
The BagIt File Packaging Format (V1.0), Kunze, J., Littman, J., et al. RFC 8493, doi:10.17487/RFC8493, October 2018, https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8493
Uniform Resolution of Compact Identifiers for Biomedical Data, Wimalaratne, S, Juty, N, Kunze, J. et al. Nature Scientific Data. May 2018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2018.95
Persistence Statements: Describing Digital Stickiness, Kunze, J. et al. Data Science Journal. 16, p.39, 2017. https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2017-039
Community Next Steps for Making Globally Unique Identifiers Work for Biocollections Data, Guralnick, Cellinese, Deck, Pyle, Kunze, Penev, Walls, Hagedorn, Agosti, Wieczorek, Catapano, Page. ZooKeys 494: 133-154 2015. http://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.494.9352
DataUp: A tool to help researchers describe and share tabular data, Strasser, Kunze, Abrams, Cruse. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.3-6.v2)
An Emergent Micro-Services Approach to Digital Curation Infrastructure, Abrams, Kunze, Loy, iPRES 2009: the Sixth International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects. Proceedings, 4-11
Towards Electronic Persistence Using ARK Identifiers, J. Kunze, Proceedings of the 3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives, August 2003, https://n2t.net/ark:/13030/c7n00zt1z
A Metadata Kernel for Electronic Permanence, J. Kunze, Journal of Digital Information, Vol 2, Issue 2, January 2002, ISSN 1368-7506, https://n2t.net/ark:/13030/c7rr1pm49
Common Lisp: the Reference, Addison-Wesley, 1988 (899 pages), principal author acknowledgement page xix. https://n2t.net/ark:/13960/t68350d1q
A Trace-Driven Analysis of the UNIX 4.2 BSD File System, J. Ousterhout, H. Da Costa, D. Harrison, J. Kunze, M. Kupfer, J. Thompson, Proceedings of the Tenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, 1985. https://doi.org/10.1145/323647.323631