Identifiers

Note

This page is non-normative, which means that it doesn’t form part of the standard; if there is any ambiguity, the standard takes precedence. This page may be updated at any time in response to community demand.

The HSDS specification contains a lot of identifiers; this guide explains what they are for and what good practice looks like around using them.

id fields

Each table in HSDS has an id field; as HSDS is designed to map onto a relational database, an id is a way of uniquely identifying every row in a table. For example, a service has an id, which service_at_location refers to as service_id. These IDs generally don’t have an external meaning, but are used within the data for tables to reference each other via foreign keys.

The standard stipulates that universally unique identifiers (UUIDs) must be used for all id fields and foreign keys. A number of web-based and command line tools are available to generate UUIDs, for example Online UUID Generator.

Third-party identifiers

HSDS data can also include information on third-party identifiers, which link organizations or locations to the real world. For the sake of clarity, HSDS uses identifer in column names that refer to third-party identifiers.

To illustrate with an example: The organization_identifier table is used to capture information about third-party identifiers for organizations. This table has both id and identifier fields. id used to define the row in the organization_identifier table, while identifier is used to describe the value of the third-party identifier itself.