On 05/01/2011, at 4:33 PM, Steve Baskauf wrote:

>From this standpoint, what Paul illustrated in his example of http://biodiversity.org.au/apni.taxon/118883 is exactly what I had in mind: a URI for the taxon/TNU/concept with RDF links to the URI for the name and the URI for the publication.  The "fundamental problem" (recognized by Pete with his asterisk) is that most of these URIs don't yet exist and it would be counterproductive for a bunch of different people to start "minting" them on their own.  I certainly don't have the interest or ability to do it and I doubt that Paul has time to create them all for the rest of us on the planet at biodiversity.org.au .  This should be large scale/community effort.  I was disappointed to see that although http://citebank.org seems to be positioning itself as such a large-scale effort, I can't see any evidence that it is planning to create "Linked Data-ready" URIs that are subject to content negotiation (or did I just miss it?).  I think that is probably a mistake.  Making a GUID that could be used in the LOD world doesn't force anybody to subscribe to the LOD model, but making a GUID that is not suitable for LOD will cause those who are interested in Linked Data to look elsewhere.

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.

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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