[tdwg-content] Comments on Darwin Core Issue 205 (the proposed Organism term)

[Hilmar Lapp]

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 5:06 PM, Richard Pyle <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>
wrote:

>
> I still believe that a human-friendly name is very helpful.  The barrier is
> not the standard or how it's named.  The barrier is how humans interpret
> and
> implement the standard.


I agree.


>   Giving the class an opaque identifier (I would, of course, vote in favor
> of a UUID!) would probably create a barrier to progress through opacity
> that is greater than the barrier of confusion through mis-interpretation of
> an imperfect human-friendly name like "Organism".
>

I think this is a false conclusion. The Gene Ontology has been widely
adopted, as have been other OBO ontologies, despite (or perhaps because?)
opaque identifiers.

I say parenthetically "perhaps because" because having opaque identifiers
actually allows you to evolve and change labels so that they make the most
sense, rather than being stuck with choices made early on because now all
kinds of data uses those identifiers.

  -hilmar
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