Globally unique identifiers

The previous post regarding the creative outputs pattern generated a bit of discussion on Discord, if you're interested.

That discussion led me to give the example of my most recent email to the mailing list, which just went out with the ID D25.14.54+50068.

Let's break that down.

  • D25 is our system ID for the Johnny.Decimal business.
  • 14.54 is the small business ID for 'electronic mailing lists'.
  • 50068 is the ID in our creative area for this specific email.

Plausibly, someone else might have that exact same ID in their system. Unlikely, but possible. So what if I wanted to reference that in a way that made it globally unique?

(More realistically, the ID D25.14.54 might co-exist in the world, and the question of global uniqueness can be applied equally to it.)

Prefix it

What if I had my own, guaranteed-globally-unique prefix? And you had yours, and anyone who wanted one had theirs.

Let's say that mine was JDCMAL, because we decide that they need to be 6 alphanumeric characters. Now I have:

JDCMAL.D25.14.54+50068

— and this short DOI-like identifier1 now uniquely identifies this specific thing, globally.

To satisfy some spec I'd probably need to give it a URI scheme?

JD://JDCMAL.D25.14.54+50068

I'm not sure what I'd ever use it for. But it's an idea I keep coming back to.

Footnotes

  1. 'Identifier' there creating a RAS. ↩