Doing a lot of reading around models of data stewardship, governance, etc at the moment.

Lots of reports that are using incompatible and, in some cases even internally inconsistent definitions. I don't think the answer is necessarily better taxonomies though. Focusing on describing the essential elements and recurring patterns is better IMO.

The lack of consistency just makes it hard to build on and reuse other people's work.

Lets talk about identifiers and why they're an important building block in our data infrastructure... Identifiers are labels that we assign to things. Roads, cars, products, buildings, companies, diseases, species, books, academic papers, stars, planets, drugs and yes, people.