[tdwg-guid] Re: tdwg-guid Digest, Vol 5, Issue 5

Roger Hyam roger at tdwg.org
Tue Jun 5 10:48:12 CEST 2007


Jason,

I am glad things are getting clearer for you. The examples you give  
are correct.

There is nothing wrong with including the accession number when you  
mint the LSID. I imagine that it is what 90% of everyone will do. The  
bad thing is if a client parses the LSID and say "Ah Ha! The last  
part is the accession number!" and goes on to use it in a calculation  
- because they will be wrong in 10% of cases. The client must treat  
the LSID as opaque. The server doesn't  treat it as opaque because it  
has to do something with it to serve the associated meta/data.

[It is probably better to use an accession of barcode number than a  
primary key of the database record because moving between  
implementations internally (restoring backups etc) it is easy to  
suddenly find that you have accidently recreated the primary keys in  
a new sequence. They can be a pain to maintain if you want to  
refactor your internal schema. But this is just an implementation  
point  - you may do things differently]

The description of the versionedAs property is not set in stone yet.  
Can you suggest a clearer wording on the basis of your understanding.  
If you can I will change it and you will contributed to the onward  
march of the ontology.

All the best,

Roger


On 5 Jun 2007, at 01:58, Jason Best wrote:

> Thanks for all the responses and discussions. First I'll quickly  
> answer
> some questions, then ask some more.
>
> Richard, when I say "collection" I mean "collection event". I'll  
> try to
> be more precise in the future but, just as a warning, I'm bound to  
> slip.
>
> Someone said something about incorporating the accession number  
> into the
> LSID. You could do that, but it violates the "semantically opaque"
> aspect of the LSID identifier.
>
> Paul said:
> "Anybody got any views (strong, otherwise or proxy for others  
> views) on
> whether the LSID should refer to data+metadata or just metadata?"
>
> I think Roger's response covers the issue, but I'll add my  
> perspective.
> Ultimately, you need both (and this is my STRONG view). In our current
> situation, we have no need to resolve an LSID to data, only  
> metadata for
> records that have no bytestream representation. That will change  
> once we
> implement LSIDs for our images, documents and GIS files.
>
> Roger, I think your explanation is getting me closer to understanding
> how we should implement this, but I think I'll have to delve into  
> RDF a
> bit more. Right now I'm thinking in database schemas and not RDF and I
> think the schema we have will allow the scenario you describe but I'd
> like to spell it out a little more just to make sure I understand it.
> I'm assuming when you say a "thing that changes", that will have a
> single LSID that does not change, but everything else about the "thing
> that changes" will change based upon the current version. So this is
> what I understand, in pseudo-RDF:
> ("Specimen_metadata" just represents the changing content, I just use
> different numbers to indicate this.)
>
> Specimen X Record
> LSID: Specimen_X_LSID
> versionedAs: Version_3_LSID
> Specimen_metadata: [567]
>
> Specimen X Version 1
> LSID: Version_1_LSID
> isReplacedBy: Version_2_LSID
> Replaces: NULL
> isVersionOf: Specimen_X_LSID
> Specimen_metadata: [123]
>
> Specimen X Version 2
> LSID: Version_2_LSID
> isReplacedBy: Version_3_LSID
> Replaces: Version_1_LSID
> isVersionOf: Specimen_X_LSID
> Specimen_metadata: [345]
>
> Specimen X Version 3
> LSID: Version_3_LSID
> isReplacedBy: NULL
> Replaces: Version_2_LSID
> isVersionOf: Specimen_X_LSID
> Specimen_metadata: [567]
>
> Your description of "versionedAs" in your email seems pretty clear, so
> that is what I based the above on, but from the TDWG spec it is not so
> clear to me if I got it right. From what you say, it sounds like
> versionedAs would only point to one version of the metadata (the  
> current
> version) but the description below makes it sound like a way to access
> older versions and would therefore have to be a listing of all the  
> older
> versions. Or, does versionedAs go in the non-current versions and  
> point
> to the unchanging LSID of the "thing that changes"?
>
> http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/Common#versionedAs
> "When the metadata linked to by this LSID is liable to change the LSID
> authority may choose to make an older version of the metadata  
> available
> via another LSID. For some clients retrieving the version of the data
> current at a particular time (rather than the current metadata) may be
> important. By storing the value of the versionedAs LSID that is  
> supplied
> with the current metadata they can be sure that they will always be  
> able
> to refer to a particular version of the metadata. It is recommended  
> that
> the DublinCore term isVersionOf is used to point from the versioned
> metadata to the principle LSID."
>
> Thanks for all the help!
>
> Jason
>
>




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