Where uniqueness is more important than readability, I would go with UUIDs.
On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 2:03 AM, David Moss <admo...@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? > >
