Unique ID options

Dear all,
in the task force on Drug Safety and Efficacy we are experimenting with some N3 code to outline ideas on representing recordings of clinical acts of observations in the context of clinical studies/trials. 

I have a two-dimension question regarding the unique identifiers we want to assign:  

How to uniquely identify such information resources, i.e. the recordings of clinical acts of observations ? 
Spontaneously we assigned concatenated identifiers. e.g. http://clinic.com/study/T2271/subject/S83221/observation/O6561
Is this current best practice for unique identification schemas in the HCLS community?

When it comes to what the "observation is actually about" 1), I have seen some very strong argument in the context of EHR 1) of assigning Instance Unique Identifier using "meaningless strings". The proposal was to use UUID. I have seen some references how UUID can be used in a URN. But can they be URI:s as well? 
What are the experiences of assigning this kind of unique identifiers to information resources, as well as to real world instances, in the HCLS community?

I guess these questions are also related to the intensive debate in the BioRDF group around LSID and URI:s during the summer. What is the status of Alan's and Jonathan's proposal on "URI resolution in ontologies"?

Kind regards
Kerstin Forsberg
AstraZeneca

1) "clinically salient particulars - from the concrete disorder on the side of the patient and the body parts in which it occurs to the concrete treatments given" from Referent Tracking Unit http://www.org.buffalo.edu/RTU/ linking to several papers and presentations by Werner Ceusters


Kerstin Forsberg 
Principal Information Architect
Information Strategy, Clinical Information Science
AstraZeneca

Received on Monday, 29 January 2007 09:29:47 UTC