We've been examining the use (ad mis-use) of the DwC triplet, and how that propagates out of local portals and platforms into other ones. The end message from this work (and I am happy to share the manuscript and all the datasets we have compiled and examined) is that it is a _terrible_ choice for a global unique identifier.
There are so many better choices, that don't rely on delimiters or on what is ultimately a non-globally unique, non persistent, non resolvable choice for a (permanent, resolvable, globally unique) identifier. As opposed to having this conversation, I wonder why we aren't having one about ALL the other more rational choices...
Best, Rob
On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 8:14 AM, Chuck Miller Chuck.Miller@mobot.org wrote:
Markus,
Didn’t we reach a general consensus within the last couple of years that the vertical pipe (|) was the preferred concatenation symbol?
Chuck
*From:* tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] *On Behalf Of *Markus Döring *Sent:* Monday, May 05, 2014 8:49 AM *To:* "Dröge, Gabriele" *Cc:* tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org *Subject:* Re: [tdwg-content] delimiter characters for concatenated IDs
Hi Gabi,
can you explain a little more what you are trying to do giving an example maybe?
It appears to me you are creating (globally) unique identifiers on the basis of various existing fields which is fine. But when you use the identifier to create resource relations they should be considered opaque and you should not need to parse out the underlying pieces again. So in that scenario the character used to concatenate the triplet does not really matter for the end user as long as its unique and points to some existing resource, indicated by the occurrenceID in case of occurrences or the materialSampleID for samples.
Best,
Markus
On 05 May 2014, at 15:24, Dröge, Gabriele g.droege@BGBM.ORG wrote:
Hi everyone,
I guess there might have been some discussions about proper delimiter characters in the past that I have missed.
In several projects, first of all in GGBN (Global Genome Biodiversity Network, http://www.ggbn.org), there is a need for making a decision now. We need to reference between different records and databases and within Darwin Core we want to use the relatedResourceID to do so.
During our GGBN workshop at TDWG last year we agreed on concatenating the traditional triple ID (Catalogue Number, Collection Code, Institution Code) and add further parameters if required too (e.g. GUID, access point). We have checked those parameters and can definitely not use a single character as delimiter.
So my question to you is, if there are already some suggestions on using two characters together as delimiters. It would be great if we could find a solution more than one community could agree on.
Otherwise I would like to open the discussion and suggest "\", "||", "|", "§|", "§§", or "\§".
Best wishes,
Gabi
Gabriele Droege
Coordinator - DNA Bank Network
Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN)
Berlin-Dahlem DNA Bank
Women's Officer ZE BGBM
Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem
Freie Universität Berlin
Koenigin-Luise-Str. 6-8
14195 Berlin
Germany
+49 30 838 50 139
www.dnabank-network.org
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