Identifying the identifiers
Douglas Campbell · 2007
Identifying things and assigning identifiers to them is a fundamental part of working in the digital realm. We need to identify resources, concepts, agents, relationships, mappings, properties, namespaces, schemas, profiles, etc. But often we find assigning identifiers to these things can get confusing due to the range and subtleties of meaning, yet we manage to successfully identify and label things in our, just as complex, everyday lives. It may help to deconstruct these identification processes we perform intuitively so we can reconstruct a sensible approach to designing our identifiers. This paper looks at how we identify things by comparing the sameness of their characteristics, how we associate symbols with things to simplify identifying them, and concludes there are six aspects that make up an identifier: a thing, a symbol, an association, a context, an agent, and a remembrance. It then considers some of the qualities of identifiers in more detail: scope, uniqueness, granularity, intelligence, actionability, persistence, extensibility, and context. It finally proposes a simple checklist for designing identifiers.