Naming, Reference & Identifiers

Primes about how entities are given stable handles and referred to indirectly: minting and binding identifiers (identifier assignment, appellation, persistent identifier), the generative rules that govern naming, and figurative or structural indirection such as metonymy and indirection itself.

7 primes in this family — primes that sit near one another in abstraction space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Appellation — A stable opaque token is bound by an authoritative act to an entity and thereafter used to refer to it across contexts, decoupling reference from description.
• Identifier Assignment — Mint a durable handle for an entity and bind it to that entity in a public, queryable record, so future reference can route through the handle without re-describing the entity.
• Indirection — Introduces intermediary references.
• Metonymy — Referring to a thing via a contiguous element attached to it — part, locale, instrument, institution, address — with the substitution valid only while the contiguity holds.
• Naming Convention — Names or identifiers are minted not freely but by explicit generative rules a community commits to, buying predictability, parseability, and collision-avoidance.
• Persistent Identifier — A designed token committed to keep resolving to its entity across changes in the entity's location, representation, custodian, or version, via a separately maintained resolver.
• Sovereignty — Supreme authority.