Entity Identity

Definition

Entity identity is the durable naming of something that the system wants to reference. It can be a concept, person, project, program, publication, organization, artefact, event or dataset. The key requirement is stability: the identifier should continue to refer to the same thing even when the description, title, route or design changes.

Scope

Entity identity includes internal IDs, canonical slugs, public URLs, identifier routes, aliases, version metadata and redirect strategy. It also includes editorial decisions: whether two similar names describe one entity or two distinct entities.

Why identity matters

Without durable identity, internal links decay into text references. A publication cannot reliably document a concept if the concept has no stable record. Search cannot rank related entities if identifiers keep changing. A future AI system cannot cite a project if the project only exists as a visual card.

Electronic Artefacts position

Electronic Artefacts uses entity IDs such as ea:concept:graph-runtime and canonical routes such as /knowledge/concepts/graph-runtime/. Identifier routes under /id/ preserve machine-facing identity while public pages remain readable for humans.

Applications

Entity identity supports citations, graph validation, JSON-LD, sitemap generation, redirects, search documents, local graph neighborhoods, version history and archive records.

Limitations

Identity is not merely technical. Poor identity decisions create conceptual debt. Splitting one entity into many duplicates weakens authority, while merging different entities erases important distinctions. The rule is to define identity around stable meaning, not temporary wording.

References

See RDF 1.1 Concepts, Cool URIs for the Semantic Web and the Electronic Artefacts route registry.