Re: Naming entities

[Rob Walpole <ro...@gmail.com>]

+1 for UUIDs but with some domain information. i.e.
http://my.base.uri/person/{uuid} or http://my.base.uri/employee/{uuid}

In RDF terms you can have more human readable information in the label and
render this where required, i.e.

<http://my.base.uri/person/{uuid-goes-here}> a foaf:Person ;
    rdfs:label "David Moss" .


On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Martynas Jusevičius
<ma...@graphity.org>wrote:

> Where uniqueness is more important than readability, I would go with UUIDs.
>
> On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 2:03 AM, David Moss <ad...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > This is a fairly basic question, but how do others go about naming
> entities in an RDF graph?
> >
> > The semantic web evangelists are keen on URIs that mean something ie <
> http://admoss.info/David_Moss>.
> >
> > This sounds great but in practice it doesn't scale. There are many
> people named David Moss in the world.
> >
> > It is possible to have URIs such as <http://admoss.info/David_Moss1> <
> http://admoss.info/David_Moss2> ... <http://admoss.info/David_Moss249>,
> but differentiating between them is not a human readable task. It also
> becomes problematic in tracking the highest number of each entity name so
> additions can be made to the graph.
> >
> > I first tried using blank nodes as entity identifiers but they are no
> good for the purpose as searching is difficult and they are not supposed to
> be used outside the environment in which they are created. They are
> supposed to be internal only references for convenience of the machine.
> They are also the antithesis of human readable.
> >
> > I currently maintainable next_id entity in my graph and use and update
> its value to obtain entity names, ending up with <
> http://admoss.info/person22>, <http://admoss.info/organisation23> and <
> http://admoss.info/Building24> etc.
> >
> > This is not exactly human readable, but I can't think of any naming
> policy that maintains the dream of human readable identifiers yet scales.
> >
> > How are others addressing this issue?
> >
> >
>



-- 

Rob Walpole
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