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 [1], 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.