I don't know what might be used commonly. However, among the choices you list, I would argue that anything involving "§", a character not readily visible on the (English-language) keyboard (and thus more likely to be misinterpreted by person or machine) would not be my choice.

I regularly use "\\" and "||" as parsers for search and replace. "\\" has the advantage of not needing to be accompanied by a shift to acquire the symbol, but the back slash "\" is/was used in local file paths in the PC world. I have seen a single "|" used as a common delimiter on web page title text, but I don't think "||" is used that way (??). "||" also has the distinction (disadvantage? or less likely to be hit accidentally) of needing a shift to accomplish it on the traditional keyboard available in English.

I would be happy with either "\\" or "||" until more information is provided.

Cheers!

Gail

Gail E. Kampmeier

Illinois Natural History Survey

Prairie Research Institute

University of Illinois

1816 So. Oak St.

Champaign, IL 61820

www.inhs.illinois.edu/~gkamp

From: tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [tdwg-content-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] on behalf of "Dröge, Gabriele" [g.droege@BGBM.ORG]
Sent: Monday, May 05, 2014 08:24
To: tdwg-content@lists.tdwg.org
Subject: [tdwg-content] delimiter characters for concatenated IDs

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

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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