I don't think that prefixing IDs with some semantic "type" is not such a great idea, because it makes IDs unnecessary long (and inefficient) and because it is basically a mixture of the actual data and a type, but we have typing systems for that. In general it is also not really an advantage. In case of URLs like http://example.com/items/0190b12d-5ed1-72f5-964c-2252afd2da7... "items" is already the "type". To avoid confusion on the server side the value extracted from the path could be put into some object like an ItemId (basically a typed wrapper around a UUID).