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?
