Identifiers

Identifiers are the way that humans and machines can know that a particular thing is definitely that thing. In the context of Open 3P, there are different ways of talking about the various things involved. A packaging manufacturer may refer to a particular bottle as ‘small clear bottle’, but a filler may know it as ‘500 ml clear bottle’. In a database it may be recorded as ‘0.5L PET Bottle’. While these are all referring to the same thing, it could be hard for a human to know that they are the same, and pretty much impossible for a computer.

To help get around this, we use identifiers. These are codes that we use to unambiguously reference a particular thing in our database. We will provide documentation soon to explain how to create unique identifiers for everything being described in the Open 3P standard.