characteristics about an individual (e.g. Name, Social Security Number, Hospital Admission Number, Specimen Number, or codes linked to the research subject) that could be used to connect the project to a specific research subject.

an identifier is a function that maps real-world subjects into name or character strings, so that distinct subjects have distinct strings. A real-world subject may be a person, an object (i.e.: a printer or a file), a group, or a department. A real-world subject can have multiple identifiers. When campuses seek to interoperate, issues will arise on the type of identifier that needs to be exchanged, and the forms and policies for that identifier. Moreover, to the degree that identifiers enable users to access other forms of electronic credentials, there may need to be agreements and consistency between campuses about the policies associated with classes of identifiers.

Names for variables, constants, functions, classes and user-defined types are called identifiers. All identifiers must start with a letter or an underscore (_) but digits can be included elsewhere. The first 32 characters of an identifier are significant meaning that the compiler accepts extra characters but does not use them to determine if two identifiers are the same. C++ is a case sensitive language meaning that the identifiers 'abc', ABC', and 'aBc' are all different. Whitespace (spaces, tabs, newline characters and comments) indicates the end of an identifier and therefore cannot be included in identifiers. Thus 'mySpecialIdentifier' is a valid identifier but 'my Special Identifier' is not. (The special capitalization here is just for easy reading )

Semi-controlled vocabulary terms. Most of the occurences of these are left-overs from print index days. They would be chosen from the title and abstract and used to modify the descriptorss. Syn.

a data element that is unique to a business or technical model (tModel)