id: 1401,1D
title: IDs have two major components.
date: 2022-08-27

IDs have two major components.

IDs have two major components. The first component maps to academic disciplines with a light predetermined structure. There are 5 academic disciplines, which I number 1000–5000. Within those are subdisciplines, which are neseted in with the hundreds numbers. Social science is my second discipline and psychology my first subdiscipline within it, so psychology is 2100. The tens numbers within a subdiscipline are allocated where I see lots of topics of interest, and the single digits arbitrarily house noteworthy topics within those.

Unlike the second half of the ID, I allow this first topical marker to be alphanumeric—more specifically, they are Base 36. The topic category that comes after 2900 is 2A00. Where necessary, these notes can branch internally using the primary branching method used in the second half of the ID—that is, 3901 can continue on 3901a, using lowercase branches to avoid confusion with the Base 36. Topical IDs can also drop 0s in shorthand: 3600 = 36.