Identifier durability: machine-readable canonical IRIs with a guaranteed human-readable layer (and, not or)

[damienriehl]

A position paper is proposed for research/ as a public comment during draft-cdcf-catholic-uri-scheme-03 (v0.4.0)'s 60-day window — capturing where the recent working-group discussions seemed to land on the identifier question: "and," not "or."

• Machine-readable canonical IDs (base62 R…, the shape ontology-semantic-canon and FOLIO already use) — durable precisely because they assert nothing, in no tradition's language, favoring no rite.
• A guaranteed human-readable layer — every existing slug and key (mr:, circ:, icl:, litcal/romcal/eprex keys) preserved forever as resolvable aliases; multilingual labels on every entity; production surfaces required to render a label beside every ID (as ontokit already does today).
• A small delta to draft 0.4.0 — the paper keeps its two-artifact model, notations array, and never-reassign guarantee, and inverts only which artifact is primary. A section-by-section amendments table is included.

Read it here: https://github.com/damienriehl/foundation-docs/blob/docs/identifier-durability/research/identifier-durability-opaque-canonical-iris.md

Tracking issue: #56 — PR to follow. Pushback and additions are genuinely welcome, especially named costs the paper's remedies miss.

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