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Global identifier schemes don't scale

Started by phildawes · 9 måneder dage siden

When designing large information systems to hold data from a wide range of sources (e.g. a large company inventory or knowledge base), a common approach is to employ a global identifier scheme so that entities can be referenced unambiguously across the system. A really large scale example of t ... Continue reading »

5 comments

  • Seth Russell

    3 år dage siden

    I think your on to something here :) Any identifier, and i don't care how global it is in scope, gets its meaning from the context of it's use. That's why the triple was a bad choice for the Semantic Web. You will get better results by including a context identifier with the assertion. Check out my suggestion for Quads.
    reply
  • Matt

    3 år dage siden

    Hang on, the problem is that your example data changes over time, not with the global identifier. If you write:
    id::PhilDawes
    id::PhilDawes
    then you have two data items about the same uniquely identified PhilDawes. They're not statements about an object at different times, they're statements (which happen to have a time component) about the same timeless object.
    reply
  • Matt

    3 år dage siden

    That'll teach me to use angle brackets in text.

    id::PhilDawes (weight 10st, date 24/12/2005)
    id::PhilDawes (weight 10st 3lbs, date 26/12/2005)
    reply
  • Phil Dawes

    3 år dage siden

    Hi Matt,

    Sure - I agree that this is a better way of factoring the semantics, but my point is that I didn't write this. By leaving out the date I effectively lumped the time and other state variables (such as whether id:PhilDawes is wearing clothes) into the pool of ambiguity around the identifier.
    This ambiguity makes it easy for others to use the same identifier inconsistently - not necessarily inconsistently with the original document, but inconsistently with each others interpretations. (It's a practical issue rather than a theoretical one).

    The upshot is that you need to consider the context of the communication to determine what is actually being identified.
    reply
  • Nat

    3 år dage siden

    The security community have been thinking about these issues for some time. Here's that overview of global names vs. nicknames vs. pet names I mentioned at XTC.

    http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/petnames/IntroPe...
    reply

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