Identifying and labeling things is what we all do every day; it is how we communicate about the things in the world around us, e.g. “please pass the salt” or “my ticket is for seat D3”. Identifying things and assigning identifiers to them is also a fundamental part of working in the digital realm. We need to identify resources, concepts, agents, relationships, mappings, properties, namespaces, schemas, profiles, etc. Many of these have confusing subtleties of meaning, so it may help to deconstruct the identification processes we perform intuitively so we can reconstruct a sensible approach to designing our identifiers. This paper looks at how we identify things by comparing the sameness of their characteristics, how we associate symbols with things to simplify identifying them, and concludes there are six aspects that make up an identifier: a thing, a symbol, an association, a context, an agent, and a remembrance. It then considers some of the qualities of identifiers in more detail: scope, uniqueness, granularity, intelligence, actionability, persistence, extensibility, and context. It finally provides a simple checklist for designing identifiers.

Identity is often said to be a relation each thing bears to itself and to no other thing (e.g., Zalabardo 2000). This characterization is clearly circular ("no other thing") and paradoxical too, unless the notion of "each thing" is qualified. More satisfactory (though partial) characterizations are available and the idea that such a relation of absolute identity exists is commonplace. Some, however, deny that a relation of absolute identity exists. Identity, they say, is relative: It is possible for objects x and y to be the same F and yet not the same G, (where F and G are predicates representing kinds of things (apples, ships, passengers) rather than merely properties of things (colors, shapes)). In such a case ‘same’ cannot mean absolute identity. For example, the same person might be two different passengers, since one person may be counted twice as a passenger. If to say that x and y are the same person is to say that x and y are persons and are (absolutely) identical, and to say that x and y are different passengers is to say that x and y are passengers and are (absolutely) distinct, we have a contradiction. Others maintain that while there are such cases of "relative identity," there is also such a thing as absolute identity. According to this view, identity comes in two forms: trivial or absolute and nontrivial or relative (Gupta 1980). These maverick views present a serious challenge to the received, absolutist doctrine of identity. In the first place, cases such as the passenger/person case are more difficult to dismiss than might be supposed (but see below, §3). Secondly, the standard view of identity is troubled by many persistent puzzles and problems, some of recent and some of ancient origin. The relative identity alternative sheds considerable light on these problems even if it does not promise a resolution of them all.

Much of the debate about identity in recent decades has been about personal identity, and specifically about personal identity over time, but identity generally, and the identity of things of other kinds, have also attracted attention. Various interrelated problems have been at the centre of discussion, but it is fair to say that recent work has focussed particularly on the following areas: the notion of a criterion of identity; the correct analysis of identity over time, and, in particular, the disagreement between advocates of perdurance and advocates of endurance as analyses of identity over time; the notion of identity across possible worlds and the question of its relevance to the correct analysis of de re modal discourse; the notion of contingent identity and the notion of vague identity. A radical position, advocated by Peter Geach, is that these debates, as usually conducted, are void for lack of a subject matter: the notion of absolute identity they presuppose has no application; there is only relative identity. Another increasingly popular view is the one advocated by Lewis: although the debates make sense they cannot genuinely be debates about identity, since there are no philosophical problems about identity. Identity is an utterly unproblematic notion. What there are, are genuine problems which can be stated using the language of identity. But since these can be restated without the language of identity they are not problems about identity. (For example, it is a puzzle, an aspect of the so-called “problem of personal identity”, whether the same person can have different bodies at different times. But this is just the puzzle whether a person can have different bodies at different times. So since it can be stated without the language of personal “identity”, it is not a problem about identity, but about personhood.) This article provides an overview of the topics indicated above, some assessment of the debates and suggestions for further reading.

This document represents a summary of the outcomes from a workshop on persistent identifiers, hosted by JISC on 3 February 2010.

Coverage of these three FRBR workset APIs. What sort of overlap is there between them? A little script worksvenn.py that takes one or more ISBNs as input, looks them up in the OpenLibrary, LibraryThing and OCLC APIs, and then outputs the resulting data with a Venn diagram using the Google Chart API.

"HTTP has been successfully conflating names and addresses since 1989."

Name ambiguity and attribution are persistent, critical problems imbedded in the scholarly research ecosystem. The ORCID Initiative represents a community effort to establish an open, independent registry that is adopted and embraced as the industry’s de facto standard. Our goal is to resolve the systemic name ambiguity, by means of assigning unique identifiers linkable to an individual's research output, to enhance the scientific discovery process and improve the efficiency of funding and collaboration.

Acoustid is an open source project that aims to create a free database of audio fingerprints with mapping to the MusicBrainz metadata database and provide a web service for audio file identification using this database.

Nicolas Bourbaki is the collective pseudonym under which a group of (mainly French) 20th-century mathematicians wrote a series of books presenting an exposition of modern advanced mathematics, beginning in 1935.

On October 29 I left London for what was to be a month tour of California. On all previous trips I prepared very little. This time though I spent two weeks organizing a Social Web Camp in order to build up contacts in the Bay. But things took a very different turn.

At Hexagram 64 of the Yi Ching - the oldest book in China - entitled "Before Completion", one can read:

The caution of a fox walking over ice is proverbial in China. His ears are constantly alert to the cracking of the ice, as he carefully and circumspectly searches out the safest spots. A young fox who as yet has not acquired this caution goes ahead boldly, and it may happen that he falls in and gets his tail wet when he is almost across the water. Then of course his effort has been all in vain. Accordingly, in times "before completion," deliberation and caution are the prerequisites of success.

Flight to San Francisco
The British Airways flight left in the late morning from London Heathrow. To keep me busy for the 10 hours trip I had bought the UK and US editions of Wired Magazine at the airport to complement the 1300 pages long collections of essays by Francois Jullien comparing European and Chinese approaches to wisdom which I had bought in Paris a few weeks earlier. ( some of these are available on Google Books in English ).

The plane took off and we were a served a very good and healthy lunch - I was pleasantly surprised. The shades were then pulled down to allow people to sleep or watch films. Even though I woke up at 5am that morning, I was too excited to sleep. So I read the easier Wired magazines from beginning to end to help me get back into the Silicon Valley spirit. One article that caught my attention and that was reprinted in both editions was Neil Christy's "Empty the Prisons" in the "12 Shocking Ideas that Could Change the World" Section. The following diagram makes the point very simply:

The cost of putting people in prisons is very high. Not just the monetary cost, but also the cost to Liberty. The easier it is for the state to put people in prison, the easier it is for this to be abused by underground operatives to put pressure on people to do things they would not have done otherwise. Perhaps there are crimes that should not be crimes. Not impossible: Alcohol was illegal in the 30ies in the US before being legalised after the complete failure of the program.

Having finished those mags I started reading a longer article by Francois Jullien on the different conceptions of Evil and negativity in the East and the West. It is an interesting story that goes all the way back to the earliest conceptions of religion. If God is pure good, how does evil enter the world? Is evil just the lack of Good, as Socrates would have had it? Or is the universe a battle between two equal forces, Good and Evil, as Saint Augustin, had been tempted to think in his earlier days as proponent of the Manichean religion. Or as the Taoists would have it, and as is symbolized so well in the Taoist Tajitu symbol, are these concepts such that they cannot exist without one another? Just as light cannot exist without dark, or high without low, perhaps good cannot exist without bad. And perhaps there is bad in the good and good in the bad? Certainly the Good of One can be the Bad of the other, as this poem - which is part of John Cage's Indeterminacy series -
so nicely illustrates:

Kwang-tse
   points         out
               that         a         beautiful

                                                woman

                 who         gives

                           pleasure

                                                 to         men

    serves
 only                                                                                             to

      frighten

                             the         fish

                                                                                when         she

   jumps
                                                                 in         the          water.

Moving away from the desire for purity, may be a very healthy thing to do.

I was tired and would not have had time to finish the 200 page article. Dinner was served. It was then just a short wait till we arrived. The plane dipped. I yawned to relieve the pressure on my ears, and looked out of the window, to what was the only view of the Bay I was going to be allowed to have. The plane landed around 3pm California time, which would have been 11pm London time.

Arrest

I had not filled in the forms for immigration, so I decided to do that comfortably in the plane. Those are the sheets where you are asked questions such as "Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terrorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933 and 1945 were you involved, in any way, in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?" One has to enter 3 or four times the same information. I had to look up the address and phone number of my contacts in the Bay Area. As a result I was the last person to get out of the plane. A huge line awaited me at the passport control check point, and I was upset with myself for not getting out faster. I still wanted to get my bicycle out of the box, and go to Menlo Park to get a few posters for the Social Web Camp and place them around the Bay Area.

I arrived at the control point, gave the officer my passport and cards. But I had forgotten to enter my birth date on the back of one form, so he ordered me to the side to do that, while he dealt with another traveler. I came up, he processed the forms, asked me to put my hand on a fingerprint machine. Something beeped. He did not seem too happy, and told me to go down to the corner of the huge room, to the door I could see in the distance. "Straight down there", he said. I wondered what that was about.

As I entered the room I first saw a row of benches with a little under 10 people sitting there waiting to be processed. I was told to put my passport in a slot and sit down. I thought I could perhaps phone someone, but one was not allowed to make calls there for some reason. I did not want to bother anyone before I knew what the problem was anyway, so I just waited. Slowly people were processed. Some came out of interview rooms. A Woman was asked if she knew someone the Bay Area. She seemed not to understand. An interpreter came around. Her son was called...

I was asked to step to the back office, where they passed my hand through a machine which took the prints of my whole hand and of the side of my hand. They took a few photos. Then they asked me if I knew why I was arrested. No I did not. I thought perhaps I had failed to pay a parking ticket, but I could not imagine that that would warrant my being stopped at the border. So no, I did not understand.

It turns out that a case from 2001, which I was certain had been closed had popped up in their systems. This was from my last year working in the Bay Area, when I had moved to San Francisco to work for E-Translate, at the end of the dot.com boom. So quite some time ago. I had come to the Bay Area three or four times since then, which seemed to shock them, as much as their bringing this issue up shocked me. I told them this was certainly a mistake. Everything had been taken care of. I would be certainly very happy to get this problem cleared up at the courts, and I told them it would very certainly not take much time - Indeed when 6 days later I saw the judge it took him 30 seconds to clear the case. But the officer in front of me did not know that. The information against me on the computer looked bad enough for him, and that was it.

By this time they had taken my telephone, passport and other material, and I was no longer in a position to get advice. I certainly had never been read any rights, and I could not ask anyone for help - I suppose that is just for US citizens. In fact by signing the entry papers I had waived my rights to an immigration court hearing I was told. The interrogating officer, very slowly typed up a report. The first question on the report was: "How are you feeling?" My answer: very tired. It was probably 3am in the morning UK time.

I had pleaded with the officer that I had come just to talk at a conference which I had organized, and to then present talks in different venues. My interest was to have a clear record, and so I would certainly show up in court. Somehow he made me think that I could get bail, and that from there on I could organize the hearings. That seemed like a good enough solution. I felt relieved. Shit happens. At least I'd get a free ride in a cop car.

Ride in a police car
After another long wait, I was asked to remove my shoe laces, empty all my pockets, was handcuffed and walked out to the front of the San Francisco airport. There a couple of policemen were waiting for me. I squeezed into the back seat on the very narrow bench separated by glass and metal from them. They closed the door and drove off, the bag with my cell phone, passport and other bits and bobs with them in the front seat.

They were quite entertaining. One of the officers asked the other if he wanted to go for a pizza, to which the first officer replied that he could no longer eat greasy foods since his appendicitis operation. He went into detail to describe both the cause of appendicitis, the operation, the stones they found in the appendix and the whole trouble that this caused. His colleague did not abandon the pizza idea, and described in detail a famous low cost pizza place where there were only 4 types of pizza available, and where you had better be careful not to ask for[…]

Web IDs are world-wide "strong identifiers" that you and your software can use to precisely identify and distinguish concepts, even if they share the same names.

Yahoo! GeoPlanet is a resource for managing all geo-permanent named places on Earth. It provides the geographic developer community with the vocabulary and grammar to describe the world's geography in an unequivocal, permanent, and language-neutral manner.

The server forwards from the identification URI to the generic document URI. This has the advantage that clients can bookmark and further work with the generic document. This setup should be used when the RDF and HTML (and possibly more alternative representations) convey the same information in different forms.

"On the the Wikipedia page for what_happened they gonna show Cornelius leavin' this club with that dancer just now"

Open GUID consists of the following services to manage web identity: Finding existing unique web identifiers. Establishing new unique web identifiers. Associating legacy identifiers with an open one. Registering identical classes and instances in web ontologies.

This online publication provides access to both the full and concise versions of the MARC 21 Format for Authority Data.

A summary of the current API, as of June 2008.

LCCN Permalinks are persistent URLs for bibliographic records in the Library of Congress Online Catalog.

Submit an OCLC number to this service, and it returns a list of related OCLC numbers and selected metadata.

REST maximizes the growth of identified information within a multi-organizational, network-based information system, which increases the utility of the system as a whole.

Instead of pointing directly to the location of an Internet resource, a PURL points to an intermediate resolution service.

The project is going to scope the requirements of UK institutional and subject repositories for a service that will reliably and uniquely identify names of individuals and institutions.

If we’re aggregating (and building UI for) ’social web’ claims about the world rather than simple buddylists, I suspect aggregators will get burned unless they take care to keep careful track of who said what.

It’s no wonder so many WordPress blogs look like Kubrick or Hemingway with the colors and banner images changed. The templates are just too hard to edit. I’ve looked for a loose “wireframe” theme for WordPress to no avail.

Lih can link to Esshay's messages, in the context in which they were made, to build his case.

"...a mostly sufficient start page on my own domain that displays my various forms of online expression."

"In today's media society, in which hundreds of different media compete for the attention of viewers, readers and listeners, a great deal of importance is attached to presenting oneself."

This software enables the authentication of an image captured by the camera and can determine whether or not it has been altered since capture.

Crafters, artists, designers, producers, and other makers can use Thinglink to identify their products and document their work.

LID is a quite simple, but powerful technology that empowers individuals to keep control over and manage their on-line digital identities.

Distinguishing between requests from authenticated and non-authenticated users is possible by relying upon the standard feature of browsers that they include the Authentication HTTP header even for unprotected portions of the site.

A page of possible key/encoded-value pairs that would be useful for OpenURL linking to music.

Releases are signals now, ways to announce your identity or your culture's identity. Ways to differentiate yourself from what came directly before, to comment and flow futuristic with it.

Proposes several themes for the study of the blogosphere: economic influence, the convergence of sender/receiver roles, class and cultural representation, the constitution of digital identity and the limitations imposed by a digital divide.

Our goal for this workshop is to explore the nature of identification and reference on the Web, building on current work in Web Architecture, the Semantic Web and informal community-based tagging (folksonomy).

One of the most distinguishing features of 2ch is the complete freedom of anonymous posting.

From Pixen Inc: Hang it on the strap of a cellphone, and it releases an odor for 5 seconds when you receive calls or emails.

Hilarious review spam.

Dhalgren is a brilliant novel about sex, gender, race, class, art, and identity.

I want to help level the playing field and expose the free, open attention marketplace that is latent within the public Internet. I believe that people have the right to themselves and all of their associated data.

Contextual Authority Tagging is the use of folksonomies to discover and define cognitive authority through reputation within communities of users.

CVS is the infrastructure for strongly accounting for the authorship and investments of programmers: we can make an approximation of this process for the authorship and investments made in the production of a series of events, artworks and exhibits.

Here is a very interesting piece by Hiroko Nagano on anonymity and responsibility in the Japanese blogosphere.

Attempting to create a robust, multi-disciplinary, multi-constituency community for addressing, vetting and conducting experiments in such issues as privacy, authentication, reputation, transparency, trust building and information exchange.

Advanced techniques are necessary to help users navigate in large music catalogs... there is still a long way to go... in particular concerning the nature of the metadata and similarity relations extracted.

An identification mechanism that exploits the information found in music audio filenames.

A knowledge-based approach to learning rules for named-entity extraction from unstructured Web text.

Our research explores approaches to the namematching problem that improve accuracy, by combining multiple string similarity methods that capture different notions of similarity to adapt to a specific domain.

The SemanticWeb seeks integrate data from many different sources. Since different sources often use different names for the same object, we need to map between these names.

Integrating and composing web services from different providers requires a solution for the problem of different providers using different names for the same object.

Account of the BBC Radio 3 redesign, in which each and every episode of each and every program that is broadcast receives a stable long-term URL.

The Trust Project is an examination of issues related to using trust in web based social networks.

Developing and operating an internet-scale infrastructure that runs the Simple eXtensible Identity Protocol to provide personal digital identity management solutions.

A non-profit organization entrusted with the development, application, and governance of infrastructure that enables individuals and organizations to control their identity and form private, secure, trusted network relationships.

A technology-neutral trust federation that is continually seeking out emerging technologies to enhance its open global trust network.

DOIs are assigned to physical, digital or abstract media objects and are used to provide current information, including where they (or information about them) can be found on the Internet. Meant to be more permanent identifiers than URLs.

A combination of several nonproprietary cryptographic hash values. Allows compact proofs that file fragments combine to form the full file - a useful quality for verifying or resuming downloads-in-progress from unreliable peers.

Open catalog of media file metadata.