Nowaday the WWW is probably the most important platform for cultural resource materials. The advantages of electronic publication are instant access and easy, low-cost distribution and duplication. Less evident but of great impact in middle term success of Web-based business is the management of resource identifiers. The stability of a resource compromises visibility that compromises citation, the possibility to describe stable relation among resources, understanding of the historical evolution of a domain. But in the current WWW, stability is not easy because hyperlinks can be invalidated for many reasons (administrative, technical error, disconnection).
EPICA is an new infrastructure technology supporting integration of naming systems, in a robust and scalable architecture implementing a permanent identifier (PI) service. This project is intended to develop a EPICA demonstrator and to promote it both in the scientific and commercial community.