Identifiers
Contents
Identifiers
You may wish to add identifiers to the sub-units and places of your organisation. These identifiers can either be specific to your organisation, or those used more widely.
In all cases you should use skos:notation with a typed literal. The type of the literal designates the scheme of the identifier. Using skos:notation is preferred over a bespoke predicate as the latter will require a consumer to infer that it signifies an identifier, whereas skos:notation can be understood even if the scheme is unknown.
Namespaces
Common identification schemes
TODO: These do not currently have canonical datatype URIs defined.
- UCAS institution code
- Edubase URN
- UK Register of Learning Providers Number
- UK charity number (from the Charity Commission)
- UK company number (from Companies House)
It's possible we might want to define our own namespace to contain datatype URIs for these schemes. There is currently a discussion happening with OpenCorporates about the best way forward.
Defining your own identification schemes
Choose a URI within your insitution's namespace to refer to the concept scheme. Ideally this should be dereferencable.
Craft a bit of RDF to describe the concept scheme, possibly similar to the following:
xmlns:aiiso="http://purl.org/vocab/aiiso/schema#" xmlns:skos="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#">
<syntaxhighlight lang="xml"> <rdf:RDF …>
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://id.example.ac.uk/identifiers/finance"> <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#ConceptScheme" /> <rdfs:label>Finance code</rdfs:label> <rdfs:comment>Notation scheme used internal to the University of Example by its Finance Division to identify units.</rdfs:comment>
<dcterms:publisher rdf:resource="http://id.example.ac.uk/units/finance-division"/> </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF> </syntaxhighlight>
Now you may annotate your places or organisations:
<syntaxhighlight lang="xml"> <rdf:RDF …>
<rdf:Description rdf:about="http://id.example.ac.uk/units/physics-department"> <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://www.w3.org/ns/org#OrganizationalUnit" /> <rdf:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/vocab/aiiso/schema#Department" /> <rdfs:label>Physics department</rdfs:label> <skos:notation rdf:datatype="http://id.example.ac.uk/identifiers/finance">PHY</skos:notation> </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF> </syntaxhighlight>
