Unique Identifiers in a Digital World Unique Identifiers in a Digital World Andy Powell reports on a seminar organised jointly by Book Industry Communication and the UK Office for Library and Information Networking on the use of unique identifiers in electronic publishing. This article appears in the Web version only of Ariadne. On the afternoon of Friday the 14 March more than 50 people involved in electronic publishing met for a seminar reviewing recent developments in the unique identification of digital objects. Delegates included representatives of publishers, libraries and other organisations. However, the unit of publication is getting smaller.
Recent schemes allow for the identification of individual articles within publications.
Increasingly we need to identify much smaller fragments of complete works, for example parts of text, images, video clips, pieces of software, etc. Identifiers are either 'dumb' or 'intelligent'. A dumb identifier has no inherent meaning and can only be resolved by looking it up in a database. Intelligent identifiers contain some meaning. This is a relatively intelligent identifier because its various parts have some meaning.