Id, Name, Number, Description, Title, Short Desc, Long Desc,...

As if there is no shortage of debates in the PLM field, one basic (and unfortunate) lingering debate is about how do you call the identifier of an item (Part, Doc, Change, etc.)? It is very agonozing that the PLM tools out there were not able to come up with an unambiguous name to reference this identifier. I have seen one particular tool calling the identifier as Name but it confused the users as they thought "Name" stands for description. It is understandable that, just like in real word, names are not numbers. For example, people are called by their names (First Name or Last Name). Some developed countries have unique numbers to identify each person. It is called SSN in the U.S. SSN is the id and their name is just a name. Why dont we follow the same nomenclature in the PLM world? Number and Id could be synonymous while Name is a short description. The term Title is applicable for documents but it would be much simpler if we use the term Name just like any other item. The Name field usually has some length restrictions and hence we can have a field for long description with unlimited number of characters. So, let us put this debate to rest and use the following terms:

Id = Unique identifier (Could be mix of numbers and characters)
Name = Short Description
Description = Long Description

Problem solved. Now let us think about some real problems...