UUID stands for Universally Unique Identifier. It is a software construction standard and a part of the distributed computing environment from the Open Software Foundation. A UUID is a 128-bit number generated using a specific algorithm to ensure its uniqueness across all space and time. Commonly, UUIDs can be shortened to 16 characters for efficiency. UUIDs are used to identify attributes and are guaranteed to be unique across different contexts. The standard UUID format is: xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx (8-4-4-4-12).