Slaw readers know the value of a taxonomy. Our (somewhat mysterious) ability to recognize and group like things together makes life livable, not just easy: imagine if we lacked the concept of “chair” or “food” how difficult things would be. A taxonomy trades on this, literally, retailing a potentially useful small-world-view that should do a bunch of things to ease the work of researchers, among others. This is abstraction.
But it's often critical to be at the other end of the identification spectrum. If I work with you it's helpful to know your name, and not much use to call you and everyone else I come across “proximate human unit” (though sales people and politicians will need to work phrases like “my friend” or “buddy” a lot). Slaw readers know this from their work, too, of course: unique case names, unique catalogue numbers, and the like.
Particularity presents its own problems, prime among which (ironically?) is coming up with an abstract system that works. This is no joke on the web, where increasingly it's necessary to have a unique identifier for each document and document part, of which there are billions, if we are to do important things like archive, retrieve and so forth.
Usually it's some public organization or group that is involved in this aim to develop identifiers, but I've come across Numly, a “Web 2.0 copyright and DRM (digital rights management) corporation”:
Numly offers copyright and digital rights management services by assigning unique identifiers to electronic content and media. All electronic authors, publishers, and digital media distributors wishing to “brand” their content and media with a unique digital identifier or Electronic Serial Number (ESN) should register with our portal services and generate a Numly Number with our systems for each copy of your digital asset. NUMLY.COM keeps an up-to-date and comprehensive listing of all digital media IDs registered in our databases.
This, of course, isn't going to be a standard that we'll all rush to support — it's aimed at copyright problems — but it illustrates the need for identifiers and it might prove useful for some particular project or need. We can expect to see this whole issue move further into the mainstream in the near future.
I have found someone who has even registered his blog on Numly:
Talkin' Tech
Interesting.
Numly Numbers are universal electronic serial numbers otherwise known as ESNs. These unique identifiers provide digital rights management capabilities as well as third-party, non-repudiation measures for proof of copyright with real-time verifications. Numly Numbers are simple to generate and act as an electronic timestamp for copyright purposes. They also allow you to track content viewership, monitor ratings, and can be used as web permalinks!
Copyrights: The moment you write a document or compose a song or draw a picture, it is considered copyrighted. How do you prove that you have created this document first and thus own the copyright? You could file every digital work with copyright.gov at $30 per submission and wait several months for approval or you can submit the work to Numly and instantly receive proof of submission with verification capabilities.
How does it work? Your digital works (e-book, podcast, video, image, blog, website, etc.) are uploaded to Numly along with meta data about your content. The works are digitally fingerprinted to help protect you from orphaned works and a Numly Number along with additional HTML code is returned for you to include in your content. This HTML code provides viewership tracking, copyright verification services, and an optional barcode and rating system solution. Both All Rights Reserved and Creative Commons’ licenses are supported.
DRM: Each copy of a digital work can be assigned a licensee and rights; therefore, each copy of a digital work (e-book, PDF, song, etc.) can be issued a Numly Number for tracking and licensing purposes.
Inventory: Items in the physical world can also be assigned Numly Numbers. This allows inventorying systems and property control systems to share a universal electronic serial number to maintain and track physical items such as computers, jewelry, inventory, etc.
Micro Payments: Disparate systems that require universal and global transaction identifiers can use Numly Numbers to tie transactions together. These transactions are trackable by any authorized entity.
Document IDs: Have you ever seen numbers on legal documents? These are proprietary documents identifiers assigned by closed content tracking systems. Global offices can now assign Numly Numbers to documents for tracking purposes as well as copyright protection.
Things you can do with Numly links:
Personal N-Page: numly.com/userid
Verification: verify.numly.com/esn
RSS Feed: rss.numly.com
RSS Author: rss.numly.com/authorid
Permalink: go.numly.com/esn
Contact Author: contact.numly.com/esn
For more information on Numly or Numly Numbers visit Numly.com