Workflow is an issue. If you want to use a common set of ids, then a person entering data must first go to that place where the common ids are curated and use that system to find/create the reference they are dealing with. If for any reason there is a problem, work stops. At the end of the day, any working system will most certainly have an internal, local table of citations.

Dima at Eol.org Biodiversity Informatics and I have been trying to work out some automated way to do this. If you have submitted your list of names to the GlobalNames.org initiative there should be a URI that you can use to match that namestring to the identical namestring in a different data set.

These URI's are still a little experimental, but the globalnames index is not so if you are not submitting your list of names there you should. IMHO :-)

Eventually these URI's will allow you to link to the same namestring in a different data set by simply using the same algorithm to generate the URI.

In theory, the GNI could then also return an RDF list of other contributing data sets that have that same name string.

This would automatically allow you to create a URI for your namestring and find out what other data sets might contain relevant related data.

*Avoiding the manual searching issue you mention above.

Yes, search interface ... I have the same problem and will get to it once the schema changing has settled down.

For now you can find things in my knowledge base via the URL http://lsd.taxonconcept.org/fct/

For the entire LOD cloud you can try these sites:

http://sindice.com/

http://lod.openlinksw.com/fct/

http://uriburner.com/fct/

Here is the info on how to contribute your names to the GlobalNames Index.

https://github.com/dimus/gni/wiki/How-to-publish-your-scientific-names-list

- Pete

We intend to deal with this by exposing everything with a local id. But when we get around to matching our names (etc) with other systems. we will use an OWL "sameAs" declaration - declaring that the two URIs are different semweb names for the same real-world thing (not the same thing as taxonomic synonymy).

As for "creating them all", I generate ids from the Australian Plant Names Index and the Australian Faunal Directory, which obviously each have an extensive list of publications and citations. You could quite happily use our URIs/LSIDs in your data ... or you could if I had a search interface written. Which is what Greg asked me to do, back before Christmas. I should be doing that now, instead of writing this.

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