Re: UUIDs (Was: Software implementing Gentech Genealogical Data Model)

Bob Melson wrote:

On Tuesday 09 June 2009 22:49, Gordon Burditt (gordonb.zl2k5@xxxxxxxxxxx)
opined:

But, back to what I've been saying, the concept of universally unique IDs
implies such an id is valid for the same entity, whatever that entity is,
everywhere that entity is found - in multiple databases on _my_ machine,
on Alice's machine, clear through to Zeke's machine.

I disagree. UUIDs have a large number space such that every
genealogist can give every person in the world that ever lived a
UUID, without having any duplicates. A given person, or birth,
death, or marriage record, may have billions of UUIDs referring to
the same person or fact.

OK, I understand RFC 4122 UUIDs .. I think. What you suggest above
implies that I want to slap what's essentially a label on a record, that
label being generated essentially randomly and using one specific type of
RFC
4122 uid. But what I've posited elsewhere is an identifier generated by a
known mechanism, such as MD5, from some combination of data points for an
individual. Such an identifier falls within the definition in the RFC of
another form/type of uid. For the sake of argument, let's say that the
string we submit to MD5 is a concatenation of surname, first/christian
name, day, month and year of birth, city, county, state and country of
birth, and maybe father's christian name and mother's maiden name.

No, no, no, no, you're falling in the same mistake which is done over and
over again!!! An identifier should and can not have any meaning when it has
to be unique. And yours is full of meaning. Each and every time in my (past)
professional life, I've come across people who said they had an infallible
(is that the correct word - no faults possible) method to define such a key,
and every time they ran into problems - having exhausted some range of
numbers in their system.
Although I must admit that yours might succeed and even overshoot: I'll bet
you'll never find two records without spelling mistakes in any of these
fields

....snip....


Herman Viaene

--
Veel mensen danken hun goed geweten aan hun slecht geheugen. (G. Bomans)

Lots of people owe their good conscience to their bad memory (G. Bomans)

.

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