[tdwg-guid] First step in implementing LSIDs?[Scanned]

[Bob Morris]

On 6/2/07, Weitzman, Anna <WEITZMAN at si.edu> wrote:
>[... 7 examples omitted]
>
> Either each of these (1-7) will need to have its own LSID (or an equivalent in the case of the specimen itself) or they will all need to have the same LSID.  If the former, they will all have to resolve to the same parent LSID--is this for the specimen or the record in its home database?--in order for the overall biodiversity information system to really work.
>
>

Two different objects cannot have the same LSID by definition. [This
is more or less the sole overarching point of GUIDs].

I don't know what is meant by "parent LSID", but TDWG requires that an
LSID resolution service  return its metadata in RDF, the Resource
Description Framework semantic web language. By its design, RDF is
especially good at expressing relations between things it describes,
so there is plenty of room for the LSID metadata to express whatever
relations between these examples each of its resolution services might
wish to. Furthermore, the emergent TDWG ontology standards (see
TDWG-TAG) support some particularly convenient ways to do this,
should the various interest groups be motivated to visit this
question. That would be Good Thing,  so that different resolvers of
similar objects might actually offer similar, or at least as to
relations, easily comparable, metadata. Still, each subgroup is likely
to need to thrash these issues out separately. The TCS group is
historically ahead of everybody else in this regard, since they
expressed a fixed set of relations among Taxon Concepts more or less
ab initio.