LOF-P-005: Persistent identifiers

Draft for ratification

Part of the founding draft of the LOF principles.

Summary

Every entity has a persistent IRI in the https://w3id.org/lof/ namespace, and IRIs are never reassigned or deleted.

Purpose

Legal data annotated with an ontology term must mean the same thing years later. Identifiers that move, change meaning, or disappear silently corrupt every dataset that uses them.

Recommendations and requirements

1. Term IRIs follow the pattern https://w3id.org/lof/{PREFIX}_{7 digits}, using the prefix reserved in the registry.
2. Local identifiers are opaque and never encode the label.
3. A term whose meaning changes gets a new IRI, and the old term is deprecated following the deprecation policy.
4. Terms are never deleted from the ontology.

Implementation

Configure Protégé to generate IRIs from the editor's allocated ID range (see ID ranges).

Examples

https://w3id.org/lof/ODP001_0001000

Criteria for review

All IRIs in the ontology's namespace are well-formed. No term present in the previous release is missing from the current one.

Automated check: SPARQL checks malformed-iri-violation and deprecated-without-replacement-violation.

Feedback and discussion

Propose changes to this principle by pull request against docs/principles/lof-p-005-identifiers.md, or open a thread in Discussions.

Discussion