> Why aren't identifiers reused?
> ----------------------------------------
>
> Because in most cases they offer no added value. If I have a ITIS TSN
> there's not much I can do with it. I can get a name from ITIS (with
> some vague assurance that thus name is accepted - or not - with no
> evidence for this assertion). I can think of only two taxonomic
> identifiers that have real value and get much reuse, NCBI taxonomy ids
> and uBio NameBankIDs. NCBI ids are reused because they underpin the
> genomics databases, and genomics does real computational biology, and
> makes extensive reuse of data (as exemplified by the annual Nucleic
> Acids Research database issue). uBio NameBankIDs get reused because
> uBio has lots of names, and provides services for discovering those
> names in text (see, e.g., their use by BHL).
>
> Few taxonomic name databases provide a compelling reason for anyone to
> use their identifiers, most being digital sinks (you go there, get an
> identifier for a name, and nothing else).
>
>
> Why UUIDS?
> ----------------
>
> UUIDs are ugly, and solve a problem that for the most part we don't
> have. They are ideal for minting globally unique identifiers in a
> distributed system, but we don't have distributed systems. Catalogue
> of Life uses UUIDs, but these are centrally created (I suspect using
> MySQL's UUID function, given how similar the UUIDs are to each other).
> ZooBank uses them, but it is not (yet) a distributed system. If the
> Catalogue of Life were genuinely a distributed system UUIDs would make
> sense, but that's not actually how it works.
>
> I think users would cope with UUIDs if the databases using them
> provides clear value. For example, MusicBrainz uses UUIDs
>
http://musicbrainz.org/artist/563201cb-721c-4cfb-acca-c1ba69e3d1fb.html > , as does Mendeley, the latter hiding them from users via human-
> readable URLs. Given that we have obvious user-friendly candidates for
> URLs (taxonomic names), it would be trivial to hide UUIDs in names
> (making homonyms distinct by adding authorship, or whatever it took to
> make them unique as strings).
>
> What, if anything, is a taxonomic name?
> ----------------------------------------------------
>
> In my experience, when non-taxonomists meet taxonomists things get
> ugly. For example, a publisher wanting to mark up taxonomic names in
> text might ask taxonomists how to do this,and within minutes the
> taxonomists are off into discussions of namestrings versus usages
> versus concepts and pretty soon the publisher deeply regrets ever
> asking the question. I've been at meetings where the look in
> publishers' eyes said "run away, run away".
>
> Part of the reason we have multiple databases is because different
> projects are capturing different things (roughly speaking, uBio is
> mostly about namestrings, Catalogue of Life is about concepts, IPNI
> and ZooBank are about first usage of a name, etc.)
>
> Most users outside our field won't give a damn about the niceties of
> these distinctions, yet we persist in discussing them ad nauseam.
> Until we provide a single, very simple service that takes a name
> string and hides all this complexity (unless the user chooses to see
> the gory details) while still providing useful information, we will be
> stuck in multiple identifier hell. The tragedy is we've never had
> more people genuinely interested in linking to names than at present
> -- publishers are desperately trying to add "semantic value" to their
> content, and we are spectacularly ill-equipped to deliver this (and
> it's our own fault).
>
> I rather suspect we're rapidly approaching the point where users
> outside taxonomy will simply say "to hell with these taxonomists,
> let's just use Wikipedia and be done with it."
>
> Regards
>
> Rod
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> 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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