Numerical Identifiers

Shortly the OEO will switch from human readable names to alphanumeric identifiers.

Reasoning

See the #133 for the whole discussion. Alphanumeric identifiers are listed as best practice and commonly used because in most cases their advantages outweigh the disadvantages. A short summary is given below:

Advantages

• versioning and backward compability: a name for a concept can change in a new version of the ontology without its identifier (in databases etc) having to be changed everywhere
• user groups: if people talk about the same concept but can't decide on a main name for it they can both be added as labels for this concept and the people can get there own views showing their prefered label
• better readability of long names: in labels we dont have to use CamelCase so long names like NonRenewableMunicipalWasteFuel would be better readable as "non renewable municipial waste fuel"

Disadvantages

• the file is harder to read without a tool like protege (that will automatically show labels instead of the alphanumerical identifiers)

Implementation in the OEO

Identifiers will look like this: OEO_00140123

They are structured in three parts: OEO_[yyyy][xxxx]

• "OEO_" identifies them as part of the OEO ontology
• [yyyy] identifies the user who added the classes. Each user gets a unique ID (list below). Entities with the ID 0000 were created before the change to alphanumeric identifiers was made.
• [xxxx] identifies the specific class added by the user. This enables every user to create 10000 entities before having to get a new ID. IDs are assigned chronologically to each entity, starting with 0000.

How to change your settings

Every user has to set his protégé user settings according to the structure of the identifiers used in the OEO.

This is done by clicking on File -> Preferences -> new entities.

Then the following settings are selected:

Entity IRI:

• Active ontology IRI
• /
• Auto-generated ID

Entity Label:

• Same as label renderer

Auto-generated ID:

• Numeric (iterative)
• prefix: OEO_[your user id] e.g. OEO_0001 if you user ID is 1
• Digit count: 4

check "Remember last ID between Protégé sessions"

then click "OK"