+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 <[email protected]>wrote: > Where uniqueness is more important than readability, I would go with UUIDs. > > On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 2:03 AM, David Moss <[email protected]> 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 Email [email protected] Tel. +44 (0)7969 869881 Skype: RobertWalpolehttp://www.linkedin.com/in/robwalpole
