At 02:30 PM 9/24/2004, Richard Pyle wrote:

I think the important parts of this discussion surround the functional parameters of the GUIDs for biological objects:

1. Should issuance of IDs be controlled from a single source; or freely

created by anyone with a computer, anywhere, anytime; or something in-between?

2. Is it important that all biological objects use the same scheme for ID

sourcing, or is it advantageous to chose a scheme optimal for each class of object (e.g., privately owned and managed specimen data, vs. publicly owned and managed taxonomic nomenclature data)?

To provide another context for GUID's and LSID's, the CIPRes project (via Dan Miranker) is considering LSID's as the glue (there is probably a better metaphor) for backpointers to datasources for taxa/characters/states from the next version of Treebase. That is, if you deposit a Nexus file (which will obviously no longer be a monolithic 'file', but an XML document) in TreeBase and have images/movies/voxel data sets to illustrate a character state, a LSID will provide a source for exploring additional supporting documentation for that cell of the matrix. SDD fits into this communication in ways that are clear only at a pretty abstract level, but are involved in standardizing the exchange of data (mostly morphological) between character sources and CIPRes. We also imagine that a LSID will provide a link to the taxon concept invoked for a row in the matrix and presumably for specimens used to make the observations.

The interlinking of biodiversity and phylogenetic data in this context suggests to this observer (somewhere between Richard Pyle and his aquarium fish in terms of understanding), that a single source of ID's would not scale. It also strongly argues for LSID's over meaningless keys as essential to projects like CIPRes, which only want to store the logic for resolving a URN (and in real time for users of the data) that could refer to a bunch of different kinds of things.

Hope that is clear (enough).

Wishing I was going to New Zealand, Julian

Julian Humphries DigiMorph.Org Geological Sciences University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78712 512-471-3275