0.6 Importance of hierarchically structured human-readable identifiers for entities

The creation of hierarchically structured human-readable identifiers for entities of interest is desirable such that a user who has done a search that matches on a thousand entities can be given a quickly scannable display of all of the entities matched using identifiers that maximize the user's ability to recognize the entity sought. In order to accomplish this, the identifiers must consist of the name by which each entity is commonly known (see Principle 1 above), and, in cases in which two or more entities share the same name, conflicts must be broken with further data elements that are likely to increase recognition value for users and that are predictable and readily comprehensible, such that users can find the correct place in a sorted list of a thousand entities as quickly as possible (see Principle 2 above). These data elements used to break conflicts can be labelled in the RDF model as sort 1, sort 2, sort 3, etc., so that sorted displays of multiple entities can be maximized for user recognition value, and so that sorted displays can always begin with the name commonly known to the user (Principle 1), and subarrange under that only when additional sort elements are necessary to break conflicts (Principle 2). This will be an immense improvement over existing OPAC sorting software which mixes up entity names indiscriminately with elements supplied by catalogers to break conflicts in such a way that a user's search cannot be successful unless they know ahead of time about elements supplied by the cataloger (for an example, search in any OPAC for journals with the title Health or for the subject heading power as used in the discipline of political science rather than in the discipline of electrical engineering).
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