IPNI seemed to work. However, I was somewhat appalled to observe that
they seem to change the revision identifier any time that they change
any part of the metadata. That renders the LSID useless as a permanent
GUID for the name and I believe is inconsistent with the design of LSIDs
where the revision is only supposed to change if the underlying data
itself (NOT metadata) changes.
It is my understanding that this is exactly how LSID's are supposed to work and one reason I don't like them.
[sorry - didn't try zoobank since I was looking for plants]
I have tried ZooBank and those LSID's seem to work.
I don't know which (if any) of the Web sites listed on Rod's status page
use generic HTTP URI guids (rather than LSIDs) to refer to taxon names.
I tried out the Global Names index that Pete was mentioning. The URI
version of the UUIDs (e.g.
http://gni.globalnames.org/name_strings/3a70f04d-fd29-5570-ba91-52dae0c3d07f)
do resolve under content negotiation, but the only useful information
that the RDF representation seems to provide is the actual name string
that was used to generate the UUID. Until some other useful linked
information is added to the RDF, there doesn't seem to be much advantage
in pointing a semantic client to the URI over just using a string
literal for the name.
Yes, this is one reason this part of the GNI is still experimental, but the idea is that these can be further developed to expose RDF that
1) Indicates what contributing databases contain that namestring
2) Links to the resolution group which contains all the variations of that name string (It might make the most sense to have the linkto's there)
3) These will then be tied to various types of TaxonConcepts, TNU's etc.
I can't speak for the GNI or GNA but my understanding is that the initial goal is to get all the names used into one very large repository.
So the bottom line is that of the LSID services for names that I've
tried so far, only ubio.org seems to have LSIDs for names that are
unchanging, can work as a proxied URI, and that produce actual useful
RDF. That's pretty disappointing given the apparently huge amount of
work that's been put into building these various systems.
I think that part of the problem is that LSID's are really only used and advocated by a small group within the larger informatics community.
They do not benefit from all the related tools and code that already exists for the general semantic web and linked data community.
In addition, some of the problems you experience are the result of the design of LSID's - to add versioning they lost stability.
The assumption is that you will write the tools that understand that LSIDs are different from LOD identifiers and process them accordingly.
How has that assumption held up?
Respectfully,
- Pete