On 07/21/2010 03:36 PM, Jakob wrote: > Hi, > > Talking about identifiers for bibliographic records I just want to > stress one crucial point: > >> This gives us the following key, guaranteed to be unique: >> KangHsuKrajbich20091011b > > There is absolutely no such thing as a "guaranteed unique identifier" > that can be derived from existing metadata. You will *always* have > false positives (different publications get the same identifier [1]) > and false negatives (same publication has different identifiers [2]). > Fuzzy identifiers even occur if they are created by the publisher or > author himself (for instance duplicate ISBNs for definitely different > editions or even totally different books). If you argue about > identifiers please keep in mind that you *always* talk about > heuristics but not about something "unique per se". Existing > identifiers only differ in the ratio of false positives and false > negatives. > > The only way you may get unique identifiers is to assign your own > identifiers that are *not* derived from the content - such as > auto-incremented record ids in a database. Even then they are not > unique if you change the content because the identity of the object > may change.
I haven't been following this thread, but the way I addressed this in my own bibliography manager (http://yabman.sourceforge.net/) is: the BibTeX key is the first author's name (lowercased) plus an auto-incremented ID. So for example, one of my papers is "priedhorsky229". 229 is arbitrary, but there's only a few 3-digit numbers per author, so I don't get confused. Now in a large system, that would obviously break down into the long, incomprehensible CiteULike-type IDs. A compromise could be that the ID is the first author's name plus an auto-incrememented ID per author. So for example, the first paper of mine the system learns is priedhorsky1, the second priedhorsky2, etc. So you get a system-generated ID for uniqueness but also something comprehensible for people. HTH, Reid _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
