I3C folds

Roderic Page r.page at BIO.GLA.AC.UK
Wed Nov 2 12:24:36 CET 2005


A colleague spotted this news item in Bio-IT World
(http://www.bio-itworld.com/newsitems/2005/oct2005/10-27-05-news-i3c?
page=1) about I3C (the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure
Consortium) folding.

I3C were instrumental in getting LSIDs of the ground. This might seem
to bode poorly for LSIDs, but I think it's clear that the future of
LSIDs is distinct from that of I3C -- the source code is available, and
LSIDs are being used.

For me the interesting point made by the article is that the goals of
I3C overlap with the Semantic Web community, and hence the pressing
need for I3C began to fade. My sense is that much of what we want to
achieve can be done on the back of work being done by the Semantic Web
community -- indeed my own work on taxonomic and phylogenetic databases
is heavily influenced by these ideas. As the Bio-IT World article
points out, a key step towards using Semantic Web technologies is the
use of globally unique identifiers, i.e., LSIDs.

Regards

Rod

Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom

Phone:    +44 141 330 4778
Fax:      +44 141 330 2792
email:    r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
web:      http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html

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