This article provides details on how Cofactor IDs work and how they are managed.
Because of the existence of search engines, it is very important to have an identifier that is uniquely suited to identify you or your product.
Cofactor's identifier mechanism is a standard for naming any object, concept, or "thing" with a globally unambiguous persistent key.
A Cofactor ID is obtained by applying for registration. Cofactor IDs are machine-generated, and, unlike domain names, they never cause conflicts or competition for easy-to-remember and/or clever character combinations or match registered trademarks.
All entities registered with Cofactor are assigned a GUID. A Cofactor GUID is a 128-bit number generated when an entity is registered and remains unchanged. GUIDs can be used in applications as globally unique URIs when prefixed with http://cofactor.io/ (e.g. http://cofactor.io/9202a8c0-4000-641f-8000-00000029c277).
Notable entities are also assigned short Cofactor IDs. These IDs begin with /c/. Cofactor IDs can be used in applications as globally unique URIs when prefixed with http://cofactor.io (e.g. http://cofactor.io/c/1tcyvtyc).