Globally Unique Identifier

[Julian H]

>>
>>One key use of GBIF-merged specimen records is to count or plot the number
>>of organisms in an area.  When a wide net is thrown around the globe, the
>>duplicate records are caught and return overstated counts.  Ideally a GUID
>>would identify a single unique organism record and enable duplicates to be
>>identified, but I can see no easy way for that to occur within LSID.
>>
>>
>
>There is some discussion of how this might happen with LSID in
>http://efgblade.cs.umb.edu/twiki/bin/view/BDEI/AbstractEntities
>
>Please feel free to contribute to it.


Because I don't really like to use Wiki's I am going to continue this
thread here.  There are some useful examples abstract and "real"
instantiations of LSID 's at:
http://www.i3c.org/wgr/ta/resources/lsid/docs/LSIDqueriesAndResponses.txt

Here is a relevant section:

IsAbstractOf Query:
LSIDs may name abstract concepts suchs as "rat myoglobin" as well as
concrete instantiations of those concepts such as "rat myoglobin in FASTA
format".  This query is used to find all of the LSIDs naming concrete
instantiations of a particular LSID that refers to an abstract
concept.  In english, the query string below literaly reads: "Fill in the
blank, 1AFT is an abstract concept of _________?"  Another way to think
about it is, "What concrete instantiations of the abstract concept '1AFT'
exist?" The response includes the LSIDs of the 1AFT data in four different
formats.

Query string:
<URN:LSID:pdb.org:PDB:1AFT:><URN:LSID:i3c.org:predicates:isAbstractOf:>?x

Response:
URN:LSID:pdb.org:PDB:1AFT-PDB:
URN:LSID:pdb.org:PDB:1AFT-mmCIF:
URN:LSID:pdb.org:PDB:1AFT-JPG:
URN:LSID:pdb.org:PDB:1AFT-FASTA:

I can think of lots of similar examples in our domain.

Browsing http://www.i3c.org/ and
http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/lsid/ will generally provide you
with examples similar to all of our issues.  Somewhere in all those
articles there must be examples of how to recognize the identify of a
sequence that has been deposited in two different sequence databases.  Lots
of good reading for the long plane trip to NZ.

Julian



Julian Humphries
DigiMorph.Org
Geological Sciences
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, TX 78712
512-471-3275