While I do think that every document at every significant granularity should have a persistent universal identifier (PRESTO), and while I think id's are great in an 80/20 YAGNI kind of way, I don't think we should knock id's just because they have document scope: uri fragment # is pretty practical.
For the uses where document scope is not good enough, would getting rid of IDs improve things? It does not seem to follow.
The problem
Webb,Thanks for the clarification - this is the first time that I have heard that there was an open world assumption on NIEM XML messages. I understand the need for message id/idref pairs being local, but without the OW assumption, this has always seemed problematic to me.So, let me ask you a modeling question. You have a weak (i.e., has the potentially to be not immediately dereferenceable) association to an entity that does have a global identifier. Would it be legal to model an explicit named object (such as <ChildRef> for <Child>), with the assumptions that 1) <ChildRef> is a proxy, 2) rdf:about is a valid construct, and 3) child: has a prefix attribute or some other mechanism for resolving the CURIE?<Person>
<Name>...</Name><ChildRef rdf:about="child:JaneDoe"/>
</Person>I know some people have been working on a NIEM RDF, but the documentation on the ground for it is sparse.