Hi Vicenç. Please consider the concept of "unique identifier"[1]. The only purpose it has is that it must be able to uniquely identify an entity, in this case a momument. A uniquely identified monument can have multiple properties. One of those could be the country it is in (or normalised a country id which is the unique identifier of a country name), or a reference to a unique identifier in a country's system, a municipality's system or an autonomous region's system for monuments. Unique identifiers are completely trivial and the only requirement is that they are unique and that you do not run out of them before your collection is complete. Unique identifiers are usually optimised for data processing, and databases index integers usually pretty well. Cheers! Siebrand [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unique_identifier Van: Vicenç Riullop <vriullop(a)hotmail.com> Beantwoorden - Aan: Wiki Loves Monuments Photograph Competition <wikilovesmonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Datum: Sun, 13 Mar 2011 16:01:02 +0000 Aan: <wikilovesmonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Onderwerp: [Wiki Loves Monuments] Unique identifiers I have some doubts about the identifiers. How will we distinguish if monument number 50 is from Nederland or Andorra? Perhaps should it be identified with a prefix (NL-50, AD-50), or perhaps is there any solution in mind? Moroever, in Spain we can find different formats in different sources: "(R.I.) - 51 - 0010580 - 00000", "R-I-51-0010580", and others. Obviously we need to unify to an unique format and we are discussing it with wm-es, but I would appreciate some inputs. "R.I." or "R-I" stands for Registro de Inmuebles (buildings' register) and "51" is the category for monuments. Probably it is not a good idea to ask participants to type acomplicated number format with spaces, zeros, etc. One solution is to reduce it to its numeric form "10580" or perhaps to construct a simplified format like "RI510010580". What are the technical implications about identifiers, and which would be the best approach? _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu

Oh, that is a problem in Germany too. The greatest we can dream of are unique ids in a state. But within a state, they often have ids only within a municipality. Ziko

I think I have got it. The special upload form may not be as simple as last year [1] with a field for Rijksmonumentnummer. For Germany, i.e., the user should first select country, state, municipality, and then type the number, unless the identifier includes some codification. For Spain, if all monuments have the same prefix R-I-51, then this part is not relevant as an identifier and it will be easier to type only the integer part. [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Upload&uselang=n… Vicenç Riullop _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.eu