Identifiers and resolvers

Earlier this year I was delighted to receive an invitation from Megan Brewster of Impinj to speak about GS1 Digital Link at an IEEE workshop called Number Resolution: enabling every consumer to connect to their items’ digital twins. Being invited to speak about one's work at an event outside one's own organisation is always flattering but I was especially pleased this time as it was a chance to talk specifically about identifiers and resolvers to an audience comprising that tiny slice of society that shares my enthusiasm for such things.

This is one of the better talks I've done recently, made better by the post-production skills of Nick Lansley. Topics covered include:

• Making an established identifier system resolvable
• Use of the linkType parameter to control resolver behaviour
• Defining and using link relation types as RDF predicates
• How to do all this without breaking BCP 190

That last point is relevant to any identifier system that tries to state that a particular structure within the path of a URL is somehow universal and must apply to all domains (it doesn't).