The Model Identification Code (MIC) is used to identify an individual product or project. To be valid it has to be between 2 and 14 characters long which can include only numbers and upper-case letters. According to the specification, projects must apply to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA) to register an MIC. In practice however, this is more relevant to equipment suppliers and if the data is not going to be exported to other organisations then it should be sufficient to think up a code which is (a) unlikely to be used by anyone else, perhaps by including an organisation name, and (b) which is not one of those already registered. The registered codes can be seen at http://www.nspa.nato.int/en/organization/Logistics/LogServ/asds2000m.htm

During the Knowledge Warehouse migration project, the model identification code went through several iterations of change. Initially a very project specific name was chosen but it was soon realised that the project name would become meaningless over time. A thought experiment was carried out to envisage what content might be managed as S1000D in the future. This led to a very high-level name which would cover any content from anywhere within, not only the airline, but its parent company as well. This idea was soon dropped when it was realised that the rest of the numbering system would be exhausted long before it could manage that many documents. In the end a name which was airline specific and signified internal company documents was chosen. If other types of documents from the same airline or documents from other associated organisations were placed in the repository then new model identification codes would be chosen for them.