I have been thinking about the following pattern. In part after looking at the GBIF vocabulary.

I am not sure if it is even a good idea but might be worth some discussion.

For those fields that have both a string and "ID" form maybe the following pattern might be useful

hasScientificName = string form
hasScientificNameURI = Resolvable LOD compliant identifier
hasScientificNameLSID = LSID identifier which could be resolvable once you add the "http:proxy" etc.

This allows all three forms to be included if desired, it also provides a hint as to how the field should be interpreted or resolved.

One group could also provide a mapping service so that each record does not need to include all three forms, but would allow systems
to find the matching LSID for a given URI or vs. versa.

My concern was that it would be difficult to infer how a scientificNameID should be interpreted by other systems.

Is this an LSD, is it a URI, is it a UUID etc. ?

This impacts the structure of the RDF.

* Note that the actual identifiers might not be correct, the example below is more about the form of the RDF
* For instance, I don't think it is probably correct to see the COL LSID as just a namestring
* Also in this example the GNI name does not exactly match the string name

<dwc:hasScientificName>Puma concolor (Linnaeus 1771)</dwc:hasScientificName>
<dwc:hasScientificNameURI rdf:resource="http://gni.globalnames.org/name_strings/6c3dc35f-d901-5cc5-b9c8-ad241069b9f8"/>
<dwc:hasScientificNameLSID rdf:resource="urn:lsid:catalogueoflife.org:taxon:24e7d624-60a7-102d-be47-00304854f810:ac2010"/>

Some system may choke on the LSID form assuming that it uses a standard resolution mechanism

So it might be best to use this form

<dwc:hasScientificNameLSID>urn:lsid:catalogueoflife.org:taxon:24e7d624-60a7-102d-be47-00304854f810:ac2010</dwc:hasScientificNameLSID>

- Pete

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