Tilteknum

Tilteknum is a neologism used in some discussions of information organization to denote a stable, numeric identifier derived from a text title. The term is not part of any formal standard and has no widely accepted definition in major reference works; it appears mainly in theoretical or speculative contexts rather than in deployed systems.

Origin and terminology are not well established. The word tilteknum seems to blend ideas of a title and a numerical token, but there is no consensus on its exact meaning or etymology. It has appeared in online glossaries and commentaries as a convenient label for the concept of linking titles to numeric identifiers.

Concept and imagined implementation. Conceptually, a tilteknum is a deterministic mapping from a title string to a numeric code. In a hypothetical implementation, the process would include normalization of the title, removal of punctuation, case folding, and a hash-like reduction to a fixed-length numeric sequence. The goal is to produce a stable identifier that can reference the corresponding item in bibliographic records, catalogs, or knowledge graphs even if the title changes.

Usage, advantages, and challenges. In practice, projects might treat a tilteknum as an auxiliary identifier alongside standard identifiers such as DOIs or ISBNs. Potential benefits include persistence across title revisions and language variants; drawbacks include the risk of collisions and the need for governing rules over normalization and re-generation.

See also. Persistent identifiers, DOIs, ISBNs, hashing, tokenization.