University of Glasgow
University of Glasgow
In order for a collection of documents, whatever medium it is stored in, to be useful as an information base, units of information require clear, consistent and unambiguous identifiers which can be used subsequently to refer to those units of information. The units may be entire documents, collections of documents, or component parts of documents.
The informal and unstructured forms of identifier and reference often used by authors ("the report of the standards committee", "the minutes of the previous meeting") perform their function effectively only because the "scope" of the reference - the range of documents from which the specific target is to be identified - may have been limited by the physical bringing together of a subset of documents into a single "file" or "folder", and secondly, the human reader of the reference adds additional information drawn from the context of its use in order to determine its intended target.
If a computer program is to be able to resolve a reference effectively, then a greater degree of precision is required.