Published Self-annotating Identifiers

Self-Annotating Identifiers INDEX -- SPECS -- EDITOR -- USES

Please select a namespace above, and a target for links to its vocabulary.

Introduction

XML, RDF, OWL, XTM, and other tools for data exchange and metadata use URIs as standard identifiers. Often split into parts - a namespace and a symbol in it - today, most are notable only for their uniqueness.

This site treats each supported namespace like a semantic lexicon, and SAIDs as its word senses - still unique URIs, but self-descriptive to humans; formally annotated for software; and endorsed by a publisher as a professional-quality vocabulary.

The form above gets you links to services for all SAIDs in any managed namespace. More services will come later, with more security, but in this demo:

Select EDITOR links to modify the stated meaning of SAIDs.
Select SPECS links to decipher packed assertions of SAIDs.
Namespace links go to vocabulary doc from SAID publishers.
CSV namespace data, for backup or local use, is HERE.

Filtering a SAID listing helps you explore its semantic facets, find sets of similar SAIDs, and test their treatment by Domain/Range constraints. It also helps new users more quickly learn the upper ontology of SAIDs - which is shared by ALL Namespaces which adopt them.

The upper ontology of SAIDs goes just deep enough to let domain ontologies inter-operate a bit. The results are NOT without limits, nor trivial to arrange. But by declaring SAIDs for your major classes and properties, you can at least document and search concepts consistently across namespaces, and write simple cross-namespace validation constraints.

That should save work for users trying to integrate data sets. Compliant tools may soon offer additional benefits, as discussed under USES.