Seednote
Referent
The thing an identity identifies
The distinguishable entity that an RID identifies.
RSM ID Learning Center2 min read
A referent is whatever an RID is about: the person, the cooperative, the field, the watershed, the sensor, the formation, the concept, or the paper. It is not the identifier, not any name registered for it, and not any record, page, or dataset describing it. Keeping those apart is the first move of RSM ID, because names and descriptions change constantly while the thing they describe is still the same thing.
The range is deliberately wide. Document 08's own examples include a research publication, a person, a cooperative, a watershed, a farm, a concept, an AI agent, a recorded observation, a relationship, and an outcome formation. Documents are one family among these, not the model for the others: a farm is not a kind of document, and a person is not their profile.
Example
In the Cedar Valley ecosystem, Anika (451.9J0RFXDGKFYE4CXS for Anika), North Field, the Cedar Creek watershed, Soil Probe 17, and the Water Stewardship Formation are each a referent with an RID of its own. The cooperative's field records, the watershed council's streamflow data, and the soil dataset produced by the probe are about those referents. They can be revised, restricted, or replaced; none of that changes which field, watershed, or device they describe.
A common misconception
“The record is the thing.” A landing page, an Identity Record, or a JSON-LD description is a representation of a referent, and Document 08 says plainly that a physical watershed is not equivalent to the HTML page describing it. A second misreading is that a referent must be public, or held by some organization, to be identified. Neither is required.
Related concepts
The RID identifies one referent and never another. Subject and resource separates the words used to describe referents from the identity itself, and person identity follows the hardest case. The ecosystem identity map shows every family at once.
In the specification
Resource: Document 08 §2.1. One RID, one referent: §2.2. Representation is not the referent: §6.6.