Identitas: A Better Way To Be Meaningless

TL;DR

This paper critiques the common practice of using monotonically increasing numeric identifiers for ontology terms, highlighting usability flaws and proposing alternative, more effective identifier schemes.

Contribution

It introduces a critique of current semantics-free identifiers and offers a flexible implementation of alternative identifier schemes for ontology development.

Findings

Monotonically increasing numeric identifiers have significant usability flaws.

Alternative identifier schemes can improve ontology usability.

The proposed implementation is freely available for use and combination.

Abstract

It is often recommended that identifiers for ontology terms should be semantics-free or meaningless. In practice, ontology developers tend to use numeric identifiers, starting at 1 and working upwards. In this paper we present a critique of current ontology semantics-free identifiers; monotonically increasing numbers have a number of significant usability flaws which make them unsuitable as a default option, and we present a series of alternatives. We have provide an implementation of these alternatives which can be freely combined.