It's digital stupid Choose your IDs wisely

Notes by Luke Wroblewski on the Martin Belam (Guardian) talk at EuroIA:

Up front, the team did not get their API model right. They tried to use ISBNs for books and did not heed advice that ISBNs are “evil”.

Sounds quite familiar :)

They (ISBN numbers, ed.) are a physical system not a digital system. They don’t identify a unique work but a specific edition. They don’t cover anthologies, they are added to CDs, calendars and even card displays.

Lately I’ve been wanting to slam my head quite a couple times for a similar reason: not choosing the right identifier. While much of the data I work with lately has multiple codes/numbers that look like unique identifiers usable in the digital environment I am building. None of them, however, fitted my desired digital world view. While I could have adopted the real world view underlying the existing identifiers, that view did not fit the user experience I wanted to offer. Just as to a reader of a review it doesn’t really matter whether the reviewer has read the paperback or the hard-cover version of the book.

Lesson learned: Choose your IDs wisely. And don’t stubbornly limit yourself to existing IDs that may be incompatible in the end. (and: It’s digital stupid. Converting is easy.)