Data linkage guidelines


This page gives suggestions on how to integrate Cofactor IDs into your application.

When building applications that produce Linked Data or other forms of structured data, it is necessary to use Cofactor IDs in order to enable interoperability with other sources of data. This also allows you to augment your own data with information with data sources.

When you use Cofactor URIs, you can be sure that they will never undergo link rot. Cofactor IDs are never deleted. This means you will never have to update your database—the IDs will always point to the entities registered with Cofactor.

When you join your dataset with external datasets, check their accuracy, reliability, and integrity first.

Which ID to use

Cofactor is an open registry where anyone with an account is free to create new IDs. This has a lot of benefits in terms of democratizing the web but may pose challenges when you need to decide which ID is used universally to describe the entity. Cofactor provides a keyword-based search engine allowing you to find IDs which are actually being used to refer to entities that you can describe using natural language. Cofactor uses various metrics to rank the results for each query, helping you join the consensus with other data producers on which key is to be used to refer to the entity in question.

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