In an RTS/Ontology meeting on Tuesday, July 23, Roger Hall raised the issue of the ability to compute instance-unique identifiers for temporal regions (such as the year 1984, the day July 23 2013, the 20th century, etc.), instead of generating random IUIs for them (which currently we use UUIDs for IUIs). The reason is that two different referent tracking systems (RTSs) could generate a different IUI for August 16, 2010. However, if there way for them to generate the same IUI independently, interoperability of RTSs would be vastly improved. Another advantage is that we could also potentially eliminate the need for parts of the Temporal Entity (Te) and Temporal Entity Name (Ten) templates.
Issues:
- Storing whatever IUIs get so generated along with UUIDs.
- If we have non-randomly generated UUIDs, we would increase the probability of non-unique UUIDs
- If we store IUIs for temporal entities in different places/fields than we store IUIs, then we would need to create different template types potentially. For example, we currently use PtoP templates to relate temporal entities to one another. If their IUIs were significantly different from UUIDs, we'd need a Temporal PtoP (tPtoP) template.