File naming system of the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape

The following guidelines apply to the files used at the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape, including those received for external partners. They do not apply, however, to programming files, which are governed by other universal standards.

Summary

File naming system used at the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape for internal file management (exclude programming files).

1. Lowercase English letters or numbers,
2. Underscore instead of space,
3. Four components separate with hyphen,
4. Use English words, except for the description component if it corresponds to a document title

	Creator	Type	Description	Date
Definition	Person or entity that has created or published the file	What this file is	Content of the file	Date and time
Example	koseki	manuscript	defining_the_smart_city	20220601_164500

Examples:

• koseki-manuscript-defining_the_smart_city-20220602_164500
• beaudrymarchand_forest-manuscript-fluvialities-20220503
• au_pied_de_cochon-receipt-meal-20220328
• koseki-letter-invitation_poullaouec-20220303

Introduction

File naming consistency is a crucial part of work management, yet very few organisations provide a consistent and systematic file naming system to their collaborators. File naming constitutes an easy way to find, organise and process documents. Hence, a rigorous file naming system is useful for both individual and collaborative work. Yet, when working with others, we can easily loose track of files or file versions because of the lack of a rigorous file naming system.

Three rules: characters to avoid, components to use, and English

To increase efficiency and facilitate collaborative work, the UNESCO Chair in Urban Landscape proposes a universal, consistent and convention-based file naming system. The naming system is based on three general sets of rules:

1. Avoid non-universally supported characters
2. Use systematic components
3. Use English, except for the description component if it’s a title

1. Avoid non-universally supported characters

File names play an important role in how computers are organised. For this reason, computers interact with file names differently than with regular textual content such as this one. In other words, file name is not just text used to name a file and must follow certains rules.

Computers work using various operating systems, the most known ones being Windows, Linux and MacOS. Yet, there are many other operating systems, especially on the web. While many operating system now use UTF-8 character encoding, which allows for non-English characters, many still use ASCII.

Hence, using non-ASCII characters in a file name can lead to encoding and decoding issues across operating systems. For example, the same file would have two different names on MacOS and Windows. Such difference can produce errors when working with file sharing or synching tools such as Dropbox, Cirrus or GitHub. A common example of this is Windows’ inability to process space characters in file names.

For these reasons, a universal file naming system should:

• avoid using capital letter, replacing them with small letter characters
  • for example: Barcelona --> barcelona
• avoid using non-Ensligh characters
  • use [a–z] and [0-9] characters only
  • hyphen character - can be used to organise file name components (see section 2)
  • actual hyphens should be suppressed, for example: beaudry-marchand --> beaudrymarchand
  • underscore character _ may be used in place of space characters (see next point)
• avoid using space characters , replacing them with underscore sign _
  • for example: this_avoids_using_space_characters
• avoid using accented characters, replacing them with non-accented equivalent
  • for example: naïve_açai_seed --> naive_acai_seed

2. Use systematic components

Every file name should include three components:

• creator
• type
• description

An additional component, date can be added to the file name to track creation history or versions.

Creator

Person or entity that has created the file or published it.

If multiple people have taken part to the file creation or publication, their family names are listed alphabetically, with underscore between them: beaudrymarchand_guillemette_koseki.

When shared with external entities or persons, creators’ names can be anonymised by substituting them with the organisation’s name: beaudrymarchand_guillemette_koseki --> cupum

If the file was produced or published by an entity, sub-entities can be listed for increased precision: umontreal_hr, umontreal_ame, umontreal_ame_dir. Alternatively, depending of the context in which this file can use, the sub-entity can be used as creator: are, ame_dir.

If possible, abbreviations should be used for organisations with long names:

• United Nation’s program for Human Settlement --> UN Habitat --> unh
• ministère des Affaires municipales et de l’Habitation du Québec --> mamh
• Université de Montréal --> umontreal

Type

The type describe the kind of document the file is. Common types are:

• memo
• aide_memoire
• document
• report
• article
• manuscript
• draft
• table
• form
• certificate
• photo
• picture
• drawing
• slide_deck
• receipt
• invoice
• letter
• email

Description

This component corresponds roughly to the title of the document. For example, the title of an article, or a form or a certificate.

If necessary, more information can be added to specify who the document concerns. For example, if files correspond to various health insurance certificates, the last name of the person can be added: blue_cross-certificate-health_insurance_koseki

When possible, shorten the name of the description by removing determiners such as “the”, “a”, “of” in English, or “le”, “l’”, “du” in French.

Nom original	Nom standardisé (FR)	Nom standardisé (EN)
Le plan d'action du patrimoine	plan_action_patrimoine	heritage_action_plan

Date

Dates can be added as an optional file name component when keeping track of the publication or output date, or the version. The date follows the ISO 8601: YYYYMMDD.

For more precision, time can be added to the date. This is useful when various version of the same documents are output on the same day, or if several instances may be conflicting (for example several receipts from the same provider).

The resulting date-time component takes the form: YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS, such as 20220628_235400, which corresponds to June 28, 2022 at 11:54 pm.

For documents that have a publication year, but not publication month or day, only year can appear (ex. Books).

Use English

English is currently the lingua franca for global research and business. It is also the de facto language use in programming. In order to insure organisation and search functions of the file naming system, we use English as the default language for all components. One exception applies to Description, if it corresponds to the title of a document, such as the title of an article or a form. In that case, the original title can be maintained.

Ex: deleuze_guattari-book-antioedipe-1972.pdf