Enforcing design patterns for identifiers

[cmungall]

[apologies for brevity will expand later]

ideally identifiers are opaque, e.g. md5, uuid, but in practice identifiers are hybrid between semantic and opaque. The CURIE system could be seen in fact as a hybrid, with a meaningful prefix (e.g. linkml, skos, GO, OBI, snomed) and a potentially opaque local part.

It is not uncommon to have schemes in which identifiers are skolemized / stringified from other identifiers.

E.g. given a schema of people, and jobs they have over the years

if person has an ID P\d{8} we may create job/role IDs P\d{8}-{jobClass}-\d+

this could be recursive, so if the data model has sub-objects of job then we can create sub-IDs

often this is done ad-hoc, with rules/documentation outside the schema

I would like to be able to annotate my schema with ID rules - it would be good first to centrally document. But we can also imagine having model checkers that detect incoherent rules or rules that will lead to problems (e.g. if the "job" object could be shared by >1 person in the above, but the ID scheme assumes it is always owner by 1)

pattern and string_serialization gets us some of the way there...