{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2025,3,10]],"date-time":"2025-03-10T13:40:32Z","timestamp":1741614032141,"version":"3.38.0"},"reference-count":14,"publisher":"SAGE Publications","issue":"4","content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":["AO"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2021,11,5]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>In this article, we present a new approach to identifiers, one that aims to improve the management of ontologies. This approach overcomes some of the main flaws associated with the existing approaches, providing alternative solutions. Ontology identifiers are the key for each entity defined in an ontology, and enable a unique and persistent reference to each term. The form of identifiers has been the subject of discussion, which has resulted in a number of different schemes. It is often recommended that identifiers for ontology terms should be semantics-free or meaningless. One practice is to use numeric identifiers, starting at one and working upwards. However, this has a number of disadvantages: it does not allow for concurrent development, is relatively hard to read, and it is difficult to detect errors when an identifier is misused. From the perspective of development, solving these issues could facilitate the process of building and managing ontologies. Here, we suggest random identifiers to enable concurrent development, while exploiting the proquint library to overcome the problems of memorability and pronounceability. Finally, a checksum is implemented to prevent the occurrence of errors while accessing relatively similar identifiers. Availability and Implementation: The software is available from https:\/\/github.com\/Nizal-Shammry\/identitas-j. It has been integrated into environments for ontology development such as Tawny-OWL and Prot\u00e9g\u00e9.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.3233\/ao-210252","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2021,7,27]],"date-time":"2021-07-27T17:08:27Z","timestamp":1627405707000},"page":"379-394","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Identitas: Semantics-free and human-readable identifiers"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"16","author":[{"given":"Nizal","family":"Alshammry","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing, Newcastle University NE4 5TG, United Kingdom. E-mails:\u00a0Alshammry-nazal@hotmail.com,\u00a0phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk"},{"name":"School of Computing, Northern Borders University, Saudi Arabia"}]},{"given":"Phillip","family":"Lord","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"School of Computing, Newcastle University NE4 5TG, United Kingdom. E-mails:\u00a0Alshammry-nazal@hotmail.com,\u00a0phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk"}]}],"member":"179","reference":[{"issue":"suppl_1","key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref7","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"D258","DOI":"10.1093\/nar\/gkh036","article-title":"The Gene Ontology (GO) database and informatics resource","volume":"32","author":"Gene Ontology Consortium","year":"2004","journal-title":"Nucleic acids research"},{"issue":"2","key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref8","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"199","DOI":"10.1006\/knac.1993.1008","article-title":"A translation approach to portable ontology specifications","volume":"5","author":"Gruber","year":"1993","journal-title":"Knowledge acquisition"},{"issue":"D1","key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref9","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","first-page":"D1214","DOI":"10.1093\/nar\/gkv1031","article-title":"ChEBI in 2016: Improved services and an expanding collection of metabolites","volume":"44","author":"Hastings","year":"2015","journal-title":"Nucleic acids research"},{"key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref10","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1101\/320861"},{"key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref11","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/s41651-018-0014-x"},{"key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref12","unstructured":"Juty, N.S., Le Nov\u00e8re, N., Hermjakob, H. & Laibe, C. (2012). Delivering\u2019Cool URIs\u2019 that do not change. In SWAT4LS."},{"issue":"2","key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref13","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"144","DOI":"10.1016\/j.websem.2005.10.001","article-title":"Swoop: A web ontology editing browser","volume":"4","author":"Kalyanpur","year":"2006","journal-title":"Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web"},{"key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref17","unstructured":"Manaf, N.A.A., Bechhofer, S. & Stevens, R. (2010). A survey of identifiers and labels in OWL ontologies. In OWLED (Vol. 614). Citeseer."},{"issue":"6","key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref18","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"715","DOI":"10.1016\/j.disc.2006.05.033","article-title":"Totally anti-symmetric quasigroups for all orders n \u2260 2 , 6","volume":"307","author":"Michael Damm","year":"2007","journal-title":"Discrete Mathematics"},{"key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref20","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/978-3-540-92673-3_3"},{"key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref22","first-page":"1586","article-title":"Digital object identifier (DOI\u00ae) system","volume":"3","author":"Paskin","year":"2010","journal-title":"Encyclopedia of library and information sciences"},{"issue":"11","key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref23","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"1251","DOI":"10.1038\/nbt1346","article-title":"The OBO foundry: Coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration","volume":"25","author":"Smith","year":"2007","journal-title":"Nature biotechnology"},{"key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref24","doi-asserted-by":"crossref","unstructured":"Wagner, D. (2002). A generalized birthday problem. In Annual International Cryptology Conference (pp. 288\u2013304). Springer.","DOI":"10.1007\/3-540-45708-9_19"},{"issue":"suppl_2","key":"10.3233\/AO-210252_ref26","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"W541","DOI":"10.1093\/nar\/gkr469","article-title":"BioPortal: Enhanced functionality via new web services from the national center for biomedical ontology to access and use ontologies in software applications","volume":"39","author":"Whetzel","year":"2011","journal-title":"Nucleic acids research"}],"container-title":["Applied Ontology"],"original-title":[],"link":[{"URL":"https:\/\/content.iospress.com\/download?id=10.3233\/AO-210252","content-type":"unspecified","content-version":"vor","intended-application":"similarity-checking"}],"deposited":{"date-parts":[[2025,3,10]],"date-time":"2025-03-10T12:34:51Z","timestamp":1741610091000},"score":1,"resource":{"primary":{"URL":"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/doi\/full\/10.3233\/AO-210252"}},"subtitle":[],"short-title":[],"issued":{"date-parts":[[2021,11,5]]},"references-count":14,"journal-issue":{"issue":"4"},"URL":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.3233\/ao-210252","relation":{},"ISSN":["1875-8533","1570-5838"],"issn-type":[{"type":"electronic","value":"1875-8533"},{"type":"print","value":"1570-5838"}],"subject":[],"published":{"date-parts":[[2021,11,5]]}}}