Dear Pete,
Replication is a good point, although it does depend on the source being available for at least part of the time (not always a given, sadly), plus the copies need to be easily discoverable (ideally transparently as far as the user is concerned -- they shouldn't need to go hunting). Phil Cryer wrote a nice post about this, proposing a solution based on CouchDB, which makes replication pretty trivial. See http://fak3r.com/2009/04/29/resolving-lsids-wit-url-resolvers-and-couchdb/
Regards
Rod
On 6 Jan 2011, at 20:49, Peter DeVries wrote:
There are too many ideas to respond to at once but there is one issue that is being overblown.
That is this issue of uptime.
If these resources are exposed properly at any given time there should be several copies of any resource available somewhere else in the cloud.
For instance, if EUNIS or Bioimages is down, the data is still available on my SPARQL endpoint.
In the case of EUNIS is should also be available at:
http://linkeddata.uriburner.com/fct/
And probably many other places.
Yes, we all strive for 99.99% uptime, but I had my choice I would rather that these sites spend what little developmental resources they have on properly exposing real semantic web identifiers than on a site that has 99.99% uptime but exposed LSID's.
The Linked Data system has build in redundancy, we might as well take advantage of it.
Respectfully,
- Pete
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 10:11 AM, Roderic Page r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk wrote: Dear Steve,
On 6 Jan 2011, at 15:10, Steve Baskauf wrote:
A quick comment about ubio.org's LSID resolution: I took a look at the complete RDF source and noticed that the namespace declarations for "ubi:" and "gla:" don't start with "http://". I'm pretty sure that isn't kosher RDF, although neither of the RDF validators complained about it (doesn't give me much confidence in RDF validators). So much for being overly optimistic about there being one source that worked completely. :-)
I don't think RDF namespaces need to be HTTP URIs. There is an expectation by most RDF clients that namespaces are resolvable via HTTP URIs and will return RDF, but this need not be true (some well known namespaces such as http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/ and http://www.georss.org/georss/ don't resolve to RDF). So, ASFAIK LSIDs are perfectly valid, if "unfriendly".
I should say that I'm not an advocate of LSIDs. I actually don't like them at all. I simply investigated them in this context as something that might work in a Linked Data context. I should also say that I'm not necessarily an advocate of Linked Data - I'm in the "wait and see" camp. I'd like to give it a chance but I'm not betting the store on it. I AM an advocate of having identifiers that are persistent and globally unique and it appears that both Catalog of Life and IPNI (in my view) flunk the persistence test if you just look at the URI (LSID with version) as a string (which you SHOULD be able to do) that can be an unchanging identifier. We desperately need persistent and globally unique identifiers for a lot of things. If they resolve to RDF/XML then that's a bonus. We need an Emperor, clothing is somewhat optional.
A few specific responses:
Roderic Page wrote:
These issues won't go away simply by replacing LSIDs with HTTP URIs. Some of the linked data sources go belly up fairly regularly (notably http://bio2rdf.org ).
The reason I see HTTP URIs [capable of producing either HTML or RDF/ XML through content negotiation] as something of greater value than LSIDs is that people can at a minimum get a web page out of it. That's the cake. If some people can also use them to get RDF for the Linked Data dream, that's the icing. The fact that HTTP URI GUIDs fail to "work" is similar to the fact that regular web URLs fail to work. That doesn't stop people from using the web and it shouldn't stop well designed (i.e. http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/ and http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI) URIs from being used as GUIDs.
I'm not disagreeing at all, simply saying that replacing LSIDs with HTTP URIs (or anything else) doesn't magic away the issue of keeping the identifiers "live".
IPNI supports versioning of LSIDs, but the LSID without the version is also valid (it resolves to the latest version). I think this is a perfectly valid thing to do. Versioning matters to some, but not everyone cares about it, IPNI supports both views. If you want to cite a specific version, do so, if not, don't.
OK, I guess as long as people can just leave the version off if they want, they'll get unchanging strings for their identifiers and so I guess that moves them into the "usable" column. But as far as I'm concerned, putting the versions on adds to the confusion. If I can say this without launching an unnecessary thread about the opacity of GUIDs, nobody is supposed to be looking at any GUID itself to infer meaning about the identified object. That "no-no" seems to be exactly what Catalog of Life and IPNI seem to be suggesting that people do with the LSID version numbers they are tacking on. Get rid of them.
Version numbers are optional and are part of the LSID spec. Given that the unversioned ones work I don't see a huge problem here, especially as the first thing people will say regarding any identifier is "what happens if my data changes?" Versioning is there if you need it, if you don't need it, don't use it.
Opacity is another red herring. Does anybody know any truly opaque identifiers, ones about which I can't infer anything, not even that its an identifier? In point of fact, most real world identifiers are laden with embedded semantics (including checksums, etc.). Furthermore, any recent discussion of good URL structure pretty much converges on making them clean, human-readable, and hackable.
The data/metadata distinction is a complete red herring and has side- tracked more LSID conversations than I care to remember. The distinction stems from LSIDs originally being conceived as identifiers for large data objects (e.g., sequences, images, binary streams) that people want accurately versioned so that could reproduce digital experiments. In this scenario, metadata can change because it's not what mattered for this reproducibility. Some people think of data about taxonomic names as "metadata", and then we're off on a wild goose chase about should LSIDs change when metadata changes. I wouldn't loose any sleep over this (see discussion of IPNI above).
Agreed. The important thing is that the identifier for a certain "thing" (however the "thing" is defined) should not change. I have previously expressed the opinion that it won't really work to have any URI (sensu Linked Data) point to "data" and that all URIs serving as GUIDs should be considered to reference non-information resources (which by definition have only "metadata"). Under that scenario, all resource properties are "metadata" and subject to change. The data vs. metadata argument then becomes irrelevant.
Regarding DOIs for books, these are uncommon, although there are moves to express ISBNs within the DOI framework, so there may be more of these. But for a DOI to exist someone has to claim ownership of a resource and register the DOI with CrossRef. For a lot of older literature there won't be a publisher around to do this, but that's where BHL comes in.
Then PLEASE BHL, create simple, unchanging URIs [suitable for use in the Linked Data world] to identify your resources. If you don't want to provide RDF/XML, that's fine for now. You can wait and see if that is necessary later. But at least create URIs that COULD be used for Linked Data in the future and that are not long and loaded with "?" and "&" characters. I don't know how to do that because I'm not a server dude. But it apparently isn't that hard to do with a mod rewrite. I know there are at least three people (probably more) on this list who do that routinely - Rod does it with his bioguid.info site (i.e. "cool" URI http://bioguid.info/doi:10.1093/bib/bbn022 gets written into "ugly" URL http://bioguid.info/openurl.php?id=doi:10.1093/bib/bbn022 but nobody cares as long as the "cool" URI doesn't change).
BHL does have simple, clean, stable URIs, such as http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/26246005 for a page, http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/84644 for an item, and so on.
Regards
Rod
My two cents worth... Steve
In summary, we're in a mess, and I don't think this is really down to technology. It's a failure of our community to create the appropriate resources (e.g., centralised, curated resources of identifiers and associated metadata for names, publications, and specimens).
Regards
Rod
On 6 Jan 2011, at 05:32, Steve Baskauf wrote:
Well, I have continued my quest for resolvable, RDF-producing GUIDs for taxon/name-related stuff. I have gotten a lot of good information from reading Rod Page's BMC Bioinformatics paper (http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1471-2105-10-S14-S5) and from investigating his http://bioguid.info/ site.
From the standpoint of the "sec./sensu" part of a TNU/taxon
concept, based on the recent discussion, it sounds like the DIO solution for publications is a good direction to go IF resolution services producing RDF comes into existence and IF it becomes possible to actually search for the DIOs of more obscure publications. I tried using Rod's site to look up a journal article using the ISSN, volume, and page and the web interface found the DOI and generated RDF just fine. However, an attempt to use the web to find the DIO of Gleason and Cronquist's Manual of vascular plants of Northeastern United States and adjacent Canada failed despite a half hour of effort (I found the UPC, the LOC call number, and the ISBN, but no DOI). Maybe there just isn't a DOI for it but there should be a way for me to know that. So DOIs for books and old journal articles are not really ready for prime time.
From the standpoint of the "scientific name" part of a TNU/taxon
concept, I had better luck (sort of). Rod's "Status of biodiversity services" page (http://www.bioguid.info/status/) was really cool. I saw resources I hadn't known about before. I tried out several of the services that claimed to issue LSIDs.
Catalog of Life's LSIDs didn't work with either the http://www.bioguid.info/ or http://lsid.tdwg.org/ proxies with either a web browser or the OpenLink RDF browser. I only got an empty RDF element in response.
Index Fungorum was down.
IPNI seemed to work. However, I was somewhat appalled to observe that they seem to change the revision identifier any time that they change any part of the metadata. That renders the LSID useless as a permanent GUID for the name and I believe is inconsistent with the design of LSIDs where the revision is only supposed to change if the underlying data itself (NOT metadata) changes. (Catalog of Life says that they change the revision identifier EACH YEAR for all of their records! That's even worse!) If I'm remembering the TDWG LSID recommendations, it is not even recommended to use the revision part of an LSID at all in the biodiversity informatics context.
ubio.org's LSIDs seemed to work properly.
[sorry - didn't try zoobank since I was looking for plants]
I don't know which (if any) of the Web sites listed on Rod's status page use generic HTTP URI guids (rather than LSIDs) to refer to taxon names. I tried out the Global Names index that Pete was mentioning. The URI version of the UUIDs (e.g. http://gni.globalnames.org/name_strings/3a70f04d-fd29-5570-ba91-52dae0c3d07f) do resolve under content negotiation, but the only useful information that the RDF representation seems to provide is the actual name string that was used to generate the UUID. Until some other useful linked information is added to the RDF, there doesn't seem to be much advantage in pointing a semantic client to the URI over just using a string literal for the name.
So the bottom line is that of the LSID services for names that I've tried so far, only ubio.org seems to have LSIDs for names that are unchanging, can work as a proxied URI, and that produce actual useful RDF. That's pretty disappointing given the apparently huge amount of work that's been put into building these various systems.
Steve
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
tdwg-content mailing list tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-content
Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
.
-- Steven J. Baskauf, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer Vanderbilt University Dept. of Biological Sciences
postal mail address: VU Station B 351634 Nashville, TN 37235-1634, U.S.A.
delivery address: 2125 Stevenson Center 1161 21st Ave., S. Nashville, TN 37235
office: 2128 Stevenson Center phone: (615) 343-4582, fax: (615) 343-6707 http://bioimages.vanderbilt.edu
Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
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--
Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 TaxonConcept Knowledge Base / GeoSpecies Knowledge Base About the GeoSpecies Knowledge Base
--------------------------------------------------------- Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html