See OH 3 Tips and Tricks.
However, all things considered it is not really any more work to create new Items than changing the names. About all you will save by renaming is needing to set the category, label, tags and Group membership. That’s it. And if you use the model and create Equipment from Thing most of that gets filled in for you automatically anyway.
Everything else is stored elsewhere and will need to be carefully updated one at a time. That means you’ll have to update the following whether you edit the JSONDB to change the names or create new Items.
- Item metadata
- Item links
- rules
- sitemaps
- UI widgets
And if you are doing things in the UI anyway, the name of the Item becomes almost of secondary importance compared to the label. So this might not even be a problem that needs to be solved.