A document object is identified by a Persistent Object ID, or POID. A POID is a string that uniquely identifies a specific revision of a specific object in a specific document database (or docbase). The precise format is left to the developers of a particular repository adapter, but adapter writers should use a standard format such as an Internet URL. Furthermore, all POIDs for a specific repository should have a unique signature at the beginning called the poid prefix. For URL-style POIDs, this would be encoded in the protocol field.

For example, consider a hypothetical repository called SGMBASE. A URL-style POID (assuming that “SGMBASE” does not conflict with any Internet standard protocol names and it has been registered as unique with Arbortext) would have the signature x-sgmbase:// and an example POID would be x-sgmbase://docbasename–65AF54AAF–01002 , where docbasename is the name of the specific docbase containing the object.