IndexFungorum LSID Wiki

Ricardo Scachetti Pereira ricardo at TDWG.ORG
Wed Feb 22 17:37:24 CET 2006


    Kevin,

    Thanks a lot for filling in the details for the Index Fungorum LSID
resolver prototype.

    Interestingly enough, there is another GUID group
(http://wiki.gbif.org/guidwiki/wikka.php?wakka=LSIDResolverNamespaces -
coordinated by Donald) which task is to come up with guidelines for
selection of LSID namespaces. That group will untimately come up with
the answers to your question. However, since they just got started, they
don't have any guidelines for us yet. Actually, this thread is likely to
provide that group with use cases and scenarios for them to work on.

    Anyway, in the absense of any namespace assignment guidelines, the
LSID spec states that ids are supposed to be opaque and the namespace
part is there just as a convenience feature for authorities to partition
their internal databases. So, strictly speaking, we are not allowed to
add any global semantics to the namespace. That means that is up to you
(or IndexFungorum) to define what's in the namespace of the LSIDs you
assign. That doesn't mean that we cannot come up with guidelines on how
to best partition your internal database, though. But that's another story.

    Assuming that Index Fungorum has complete autonomy over Fungi names
(I assume it has as a nomenclator), and that it has the required
software development and system administration skills, I think that IF
would most benefit from a completely distributed LSID assignment and
resolution schema. This implies that:

1) The authority identifier (and thus the DNS record) should be owned
and set up by IF (i.e. indexfungorum.org,
lsidauthority.indexfungorum.org, and lsid.indexfungorum.org are good
choices while guid.org and indexfungorum.guid.org are bad options).
2) It's up to IF to define its namespaces and no external client (or no
one at all) should rely on their choices of namespaces.

    Any centralization in this case would yield in unnecessary
delegation of tasks from IF to some external entities (whoever owns
guid.org domain for example).

    However, the community MUST agree on the format of the metadata
returned by any Taxon Names resolver. That's exactly what the TAG (TDWG
Architecture Group) is doing now.

    Cheers,

Ricardo


Kevin Richards wrote:

> I have briefly updated the Wiki for the IndexFungorum LSID prototype at
> http://wiki.gbif.org/guidwiki/wikka.php?wakka=LSIDResolverForTaxonNamesIF
>
> As I was filling in the specs, it made me think it would be good to
> have a "suggested" list of LSID namespaces that different LSID
> authorities could use if suitable.  At present the IndexFungorum
> namespace is "Names" - which may not be ideal.  This will differ
> however for central LSID authorities and distributed authorities.  Eg
> if a central authority "guid.org" is setup the namespace
> "indexfungorum/names" may be suitable for taxon name objects [a link
> to a glossary would be helpful here to explain what I mean by a name
> object], but for the distributed authority "indexfungorum.org" then
> just "names" may do the job.
>
> Another alternative is to put the "distributed" authority in the
> authority name, eg "indexfungorum.guid.org" leaving it up to DNS to
> locate the authority, then leave the namespace simple, in this
> example "names", eg "urn:lsid:indexfungorum.guid.org:names:123456".
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> Kevin




More information about the tdwg-tag mailing list