Leismore ShorterID Specification v2.0.0 LTS

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28 February 2023

Authors

• Kyle Chine Leismore https://kylechine.leismore.co

Copyright

GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.3

Canonical URLs

• This version: https://lmos.leismore.org/shorterid-spec/v2-0-0/rep/README.md

• Latest version: https://lmos.leismore.org/shorterid-spec/latest/rep/README.md

• Project Homepage: https://lmos.leismore.org/shorterid-spec

• GitHub: https://github.com/leismore/shorterid-spec

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Introduction

Leismore ShorterID is a universally unique identifier based on Nano ID (Sitnik [2017] 2021). This document describes its purpose, format, recommended comparison method, and other technical details.

Differences from Leismore ShortID

Leismore ShortID (Chine [2021] 2021) is designed for digital medias, while Leismore ShorterID is for non-digital medias such as paper and with more considerations for human readability or sharing requirements.

Comparison to Leismore ShortID (Chine [2021] 2021), Leismore ShorterID is:

1. Shorter
2. Case-insensitive
3. Increased collision chance

Purpose and Designing Considerations

Ideally, a universally unique identifier exposing to end-users or external applications via non-digital medias, should be:

1. No collision in the near future
2. Friendly for human readers
3. URL friendly character set
4. Short and fixed length
5. Case-insensitive

Format

• Character set ( inspired by nolookalikes from Nanoid-Dictionary (Lashmanov [2018] 2021) ):

  •                `346789ABCDEFGHJKMNPQRTWXY`
    

• Length: 16 characters
• Canonical syntax: XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX (Uppercase)
• Case-insensitive

Recommended Comparison Method

The - characters are used purely for the human readability reason. It must not be considered as a semantics part in Leismore ShorterID. While doing ID comparison, it must be removed from the IDs.

Chance of Collision

When 1,000 IDs are being generated per hour, in order to have a 1% probability of at least one collision, ~2 thousand years are needed, according to the calculation of Nano ID CC (Zhuravlёv n.d.)

References

• Chine, Kyle. (2021) 2021. “Leismore ShortID Specification v4.0.0 LTS.” Leismore. https://github.com/leismore/shortid-spec.
• Sitnik, Andrey. (2017) 2021. Nano ID. JavaScript. https://github.com/ai/nanoid.
• Lashmanov, Stanislav. (2018) 2021. Nanoid-Dictionary. JavaScript. https://github.com/CyberAP/nanoid-dictionary.
• Zhuravlёv, Aleksandr. n.d. Nano ID CC. Web. Accessed October 19, 2021. https://zelark.github.io/nano-id-cc.