Juty et al. establish identification as the foundational operation of FAIR research infrastructure. Their argument begins from a simple but rigorous condition: a digital object must be uniquely specifiable, persistently named, resolvable through network protocols and accompanied by sufficient metadata to be discovered and verified. Findability is not merely one FAIR property among others; it logically precedes accessibility, interoperability and reuse because no operation can reliably address an object that cannot first be distinguished. The paper is especially useful in separating identifier from location. A persistent identifier survives migration because the durable name is maintained independently of the object’s changing network address. DOI, ARK, Identifiers.org and PURL exemplify different implementations of this principle. The broader theoretical contribution lies in treating naming as infrastructure rather than description. Identification creates addressability, and addressability makes durable scholarly relations possible. The work therefore links archival persistence, web architecture and scientific reproducibility through a minimal but powerful epistemic grammar: unique name, resolution, metadata, persistence.
