[tdwg-tag] SourceForge LSID project websites broken - role for TDWG?

[Peter DeVries]

I think that the two initial comments are more about poking fun at the
messenger than addressing the message, yes web pages have typo'sand links
between sites can be down. The connection problem seems to be on the
University of Berlin end, not linked data.

My point is that this initiative has momentum and a number of enthusiastic
followers, where is the momentum and where are the enthusiastic followers
behind LSID's?

One of the standards in linked data is that URI's should not change and they
have a number of good recommendations on how to mint them and persist them
over time. Some of these would apply to minting LSID's.

It is one thing to design a standard or technology, it is quite another to
get others to adopt and use it.

You might want to consider who has had more success in developing widely
adopted standards Tim Berners-Lee or TDWG?

I may be relatively new to TDWG and Entomology but I am not new to
biocomputing or the issues involved in developing tools or
techniques that are widely adopted.

My assumption is that you want to develop a standard that is widely adopted,
and that will involve addressing the concerns of potential
adopters. My main needs involve tying species concepts to observations,
environmental and other data. The TWDG standards have
not been very helpful to me and the reliance on LSID's is one problem. Those
implementations that are available do not really work. Does
uBio deliver properly encoded data? No, at least not always.

- Pete


On Fri, Apr 3, 2009 at 12:54 PM, Hilmar Lapp <hlapp at duke.edu> wrote:

>
> On Apr 3, 2009, at 1:23 PM, Peter DeVries wrote:
>
>  [...]
>> 3) LSIDs increase the implementation costs significantly beyond the costs
>> required for domain registration and a web server.
>>
>
> I think you'll find plenty of people who will argue that the cost of
> minting persistent GUIDs is much higher than the cost of a web server and
> domain registration in any event, and that it might be a Good Thing(tm) if
> an identifier system doesn't pretend otherwise.
>
>  [...] 4) Tim Berners-Lee feels that LSIDs are unnecessary, and after
>> spending several years looking at this issue I think he is right. Even if
>> TBL is wrong, you have positioned yourself for an uphill battle for
>> adoption.
>>
>
> He has been wrong before. More to the point, I don't think this has to
> matter. In 1998 he would have probably said that DOIs are unnecessary. They
> may indeed be, from a technological standpoint, but from a social and
> business (sustainability) standpoint they've clearly been hugely successful.
> So I think the question that matters much more is, is there (or will there
> be) a similar ecosystem and environment for LSIDs that will make them
> equally useful. That's what I'm less sure about.
>
> Also, I think we ought not to confuse one use-case for GUIDs (such as
> linked data) with the requirements for an identifier system for
> biodiversity.
>
>        -hilmar
>
> BTW if anyone feels this is a long discussion that has been had before,
> check out the thread that begins with "registering info: uris" on the
> Code4Lib list (http://www.mail-archive.com/code4lib%40listserv.nd.edu/) It
> turns out they struggle with similar questions (and also not for the first
> time), except in a library context, which might be much closer to a museum
> context than a semweb research community.
>
> --
> ===========================================================
> : Hilmar Lapp  -:-  Durham, NC  -:- hlapp at duke dot edu :
> ===========================================================
>
>
>
>
>


-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
Pete DeVries
Department of Entomology
University of Wisconsin - Madison
445 Russell Laboratories
1630 Linden Drive
Madison, WI 53706
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