One minor quibble about the metadata these LSIDs serve. The date in "dcterms" created doesn't conform to "best practice" (ghastly term). Dublin Core recommends using a scheme such as ISO 8601 (see http:// www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-datetime).

Dates such as "8/24/07 8:59 AM" in urn:lsid:cate- araceae.org:taxonconcepts:274386 can cause confusion (e.g., what time zone is being used? is the first digit a month or a day?, etc.). Something like

2007-08-27T08:59Z is unambiguous and computer friendly.

I only bring this up as anybody who was going to make use of these dates would have the painful task of fixing them. Let's try and avoid the mess that DiGIR providers have lumbered us with (see http:// semant.blogspot.com/2006/11/damn-digir.html ).

On 8 Oct 2007, at 15:10, Benjamin Clark wrote:

Dear All, I thought I would chip in and say that the two CATE websites are resolving LSIDs for taxon concepts, and returning metadata typed according to http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/TaxonConcept. Their urls are http://www.cate-araceae.org which is a web-revision of the Araceae (Arums and relatives) and http://www.cate-sphingidae.org which is a web- revision of the Sphingidae (Hawkmoths). In each case, we're returing the concept sensu the web-revision, rather than a paper publication, which means that it is the name as used by the editorial boards of the websites and published on the pages of the website. It is the intention to extend this group through the addition of an open peer-review process (see http://www.cate-project.org).

At the moment, we're only returning taxon concepts, name strings, a link to the taxon page on the website, and taxonomic relationships to other taxon concepts (child taxa and synonyms). The Araceae site also returns IPNI lsids where we've been able to match the name to a name in IPNI. We'd like to do the same for the sphingids if an authority for sphingid names becomes available. We've got lots of descriptive information as well, and I expect that we'll use the SPM to make that available eventually.

Cheers, Ben

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---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom

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