<div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"> IPNI seemed to work. However, I was somewhat appalled to observe that<br>
they seem to change the revision identifier any time that they change<br>
any part of the metadata. That renders the LSID useless as a permanent<br>
GUID for the name and I believe is inconsistent with the design of LSIDs<br>
where the revision is only supposed to change if the underlying data<br>
itself (NOT metadata) changes. </blockquote><div><br></div><div>It is my understanding that this is exactly how LSID's are supposed to work and one reason I don't like them.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
[sorry - didn't try zoobank since I was looking for plants]<br></blockquote><div> </div><div>I have tried ZooBank and those LSID's seem to work.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
I don't know which (if any) of the Web sites listed on Rod's status page<br>
use generic HTTP URI guids (rather than LSIDs) to refer to taxon names.<br>
I tried out the Global Names index that Pete was mentioning. The URI<br>
version of the UUIDs (e.g.<br>
<a href="http://gni.globalnames.org/name_strings/3a70f04d-fd29-5570-ba91-52dae0c3d07f" target="_blank">http://gni.globalnames.org/name_strings/3a70f04d-fd29-5570-ba91-52dae0c3d07f</a>)<br>
do resolve under content negotiation, but the only useful information<br>
that the RDF representation seems to provide is the actual name string<br>
that was used to generate the UUID. Until some other useful linked<br>
information is added to the RDF, there doesn't seem to be much advantage<br>
in pointing a semantic client to the URI over just using a string<br>
literal for the name.<br>
<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes, this is one reason this part of the GNI is still experimental, but the idea is that these can be further developed to expose RDF that</div><div><br></div><div>1) Indicates what contributing databases contain that namestring</div>
<div><br></div><div>2) Links to the resolution group which contains all the variations of that name string (It might make the most sense to have the linkto's there)</div><div><br></div><div>3) These will then be tied to various types of TaxonConcepts, TNU's etc.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I can't speak for the GNI or GNA but my understanding is that the initial goal is to get all the names used into one very large repository.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
So the bottom line is that of the LSID services for names that I've<br>
tried so far, only <a href="http://ubio.org" target="_blank">ubio.org</a> seems to have LSIDs for names that are<br>
unchanging, can work as a proxied URI, and that produce actual useful<br>
RDF. That's pretty disappointing given the apparently huge amount of<br>
work that's been put into building these various systems.<br>
<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I think that part of the problem is that LSID's are really only used and advocated by a small group within the larger informatics community.</div><div><br></div><div>They do not benefit from all the related tools and code that already exists for the general semantic web and linked data community.</div>
<div><br></div><div>In addition, some of the problems you experience are the result of the design of LSID's - to add versioning they lost stability.</div><div><br></div><div>The assumption is that you will write the tools that understand that LSIDs are different from LOD identifiers and process them accordingly.</div>
<div><br></div><div>How has that assumption held up?</div><div><br></div><div>Respectfully,</div><div><br></div><div>- Pete</div><div><br></div></div>---------------------------------------------------------------<br>Pete DeVries<br>
Department of Entomology<br>University of Wisconsin - Madison<br>445 Russell Laboratories<br>1630 Linden Drive<br>Madison, WI 53706<br><a href="http://www.taxonconcept.org/" target="_blank">TaxonConcept Knowledge Base</a> / <a href="http://lod.geospecies.org/" target="_blank">GeoSpecies Knowledge Base</a><br>
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