Recommendations

Namespaces

We recognise that unique RFID codes are not available for historic animals and that existing recording scheme identifiers exist and in some cases are regulated. These are likely to persist for some time, and offer benefits in terms of human-readable identification. Accordingly we propose:

1. That each official scheme or identification type shall be recognised with a unique “namespace”, within which identifiers are guaranteed unique;
2. That when data is interchanged between systems, the namespace to which each identifier belongs is clearly identified;
3. That a registry of namespaces (identification schemes) is established, and that there is a process to maintain this registry, including adding new namespaces if this is absolutely necessary (we prefer to avoid proliferation of namespaces); and
4. That the registry makes available a web service interface by which a namespace can be confirmed and a regular expression to perform initial validation of that namespace’s identifiers can be retrieved.

One possible method of namespace representation for data exchange (as distinct from data storage) might be the URI (Universal Resource Identifier) notation #13. In our 2010 document #14 where we compared ISO 11784 and GS1 SGTIN identifiers we gave the following examples:

• urn:epc:id:sgtin:3.003700.00542.77346595
• urn:iso:std:iso:11784:982.009104636715

Of course this is just one approach, and other methods of identifying namespaces and associating them with identifiers might be more practical.

Devices

We recognise that many animal recording devices are low-power devices intended for field use, and that such devices may not have the processing power or network connectivity to parse, look up, and validate multiple identifiers. As a result we propose:

1. That embedded devices and other field data collection devices may only choose to support a subset of namespaces;
2. That such devices make it clear (preferably electronically) which namespaces are supported; and
3. That services or systems which interact with such devices must take responsibility for attaching namespaces to identifiers, validation, and transformation where required.

References