Authority Control & Identity

Abstractions about fixing one canonical identity for an entity or concept within a governed catalog — preferred terms, authority records, and cross-scheme mappings — and the provenance or continuity questions (citation, embargo, Ship of Theseus) that test what identity persists.

11 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Alternative label — Admit non-preferred surface forms that resolve silently to a concept's one canonical label — widening the search surface so any variant finds the concept, while the preferred form alone governs every display and authoritative output.
• Authority Record — Fix one governed identity per entity in a curated registry — preferred label, variant set, disambiguating notes, and a persistent identifier — so every catalog entry cites it rather than re-spelling the name, and one edit propagates everywhere.
• Citation Pointer — A structured reference that identifies a source well enough to locate and verify it — an identification-plus-resolution bridge from claim to artifact that builds the infrastructure for verifiability without asserting the support is adequate, so 'has a citation' and 'is well-supported' stay separate findings.
• Cross-listed Classification — Assign a bridging work several classifications at once — one focal primary plus any number of secondaries — so it stays findable from every domain it spans, without forcing a single arbitrary home or minting a hybrid category.
• Embargo — Distribute information in advance to a credentialed recipient set who agree to withhold publication until a shared release time, collapsing everyone's head start to zero — enforced by exclusion from future distributions, not by law.
• Field Boundary Marker — Route a paper, person, or proposal to the right expert community by committing a labeled research-field category at decision time — bundling a named field, a membership convention, and a routing use — that holds operationally while staying silent on what the work 'really' is.
• Item (Copy) — Promote the single physical or digital copy to a first-class bibliographic entity at the bottom of the Work–Expression–Manifestation–Item ladder, so copy-specific data and operations attach to one instance rather than the shared edition.
• On Background — The middle attribution tier where a claim may be published but the source is named only by a generic class descriptor — separating evidentiary content from source identity, with descriptor granularity a tunable knob trading warrant against identifiability.
• Preferred Term — The single authorized form a stewarding body designates as the canonical label for a concept in a controlled vocabulary — with every synonym, abbreviation, and variant retained as a non-preferred entry that routes to it, so new indexing must use one form and any variant a searcher enters reaches the same record.
• Schema Mapping Relation — Bridge two independently governed classification schemes with an explicit, typed assertion — source concept, target concept, and a fidelity grade (exact / close / broader / narrower / related) — so consumers know exactly what the bridge guarantees without merging the schemes.
• Ship of Theseus — Expose that 'is it still the same thing?' has no brute answer once total component replacement pulls substrate-continuity apart from pattern-continuity — the verdict is relative to which identity criterion you have decided counts.