From OpenOrg

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

rdf skos

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#">

<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 is the entity responsible for maintaining the notation scheme -->
    <dcterms:publisher rdf:resource="http://id.example.ac.uk/units/finance-division"/>
  </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>

Now you may annotate your places or organisations:

<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>