Dear Peter,
Here are some thoughts.
On 22 Sep 2006, at 11:42, peter.hollas@thomson.com wrote:
Hi everyone,
I am in the process of putting together the LSID service component of Zoobank.org, after a few initial hiccups and difficulties I have a basic service up and running in the development environment.
Now I have arrived at the contentious issue of what data/metadata to return and in which flavour.
I have a few questions...
- What format should I return the metadata response in? From
discussions with Roger it seems appropriate to go with RDF/TCS for the metadata reponse. Would this be a good way to go, and does anyone have any static examples of such a response?
I think TCS is a bit limited as it currently stands. For example, I'd strongly encourage linking to publications via GUIDs where ever possible, including DOIs. Including bibliographic information simply as text seems retrograde to me. This is particularly an issue for ZooBank, because you potentially could serve LSIDs for all the zoological literature indexed in Zoological Record (as well as DOIs where ever they have been assigned).
- If a Data service were implemented, should the response simply be
the LSID or the taxon name as we don't currently hold any holotype photos etc.
I'm not sure you have any "data" as such. I would treat names and/or concepts as metadata. If you wanted to include other items, such as publications or images, then I would include these by linking them in the metadata, using rdf:resource attributes. Let's say you have a tag "holotypeImage" (I'm not advocating you have such a tag), then
<holotypeImage rdf:resource="urn:lsid:zoobank.org:image:156545" />
would do the trick. For an image, I think you do have data (namely the stream of bytes corresponding to the image file, in other words, if the image is a TIFF file the data is that file). For example, we serve images from SID (http://sid.zoology.gla.ac.uk/) as data. To see an example of RDF metadata for an image, try http://lsidres.org/urn:lsid:sid.zoology.gla.ac.uk:id:2000. If you use LSID LaunchPad, you should be able to get the actual image from this LSID lsidres://urn:lsid:sid.zoology.gla.ac.uk:id:2000
I'm also guessing that Zoobank won't itself actually have many (any?) holotype images, as these will be stored by other sites, so most times you'll want to link to the database that actually curates the images. In the same way, presumably you'd link to an external provider's information on the holotype specimen, rather than duplicate that information.
This may provoke a fire storm, but I think the data/metadata distinction is in most cases overblown.
- Is there any standard scheme for LSID discovery? i.e. Would it be a
good/bad idea to extend the LSID service to allow machine queries of LSIDs by taxon name rather than discovering them through the web interface?
I think it would be a bad idea to extend LSIDs as such, but absolutely vital to add a search interface. My vote is OpenSearch, which is simple, open, and supported. See http://ispecies.blogspot.com/2006/07/adding-sources-to-ispecies.html for some links on this topic. You could have a simple service that returned a list of LSIDs that matched a query. The other advantage of OpenSearch is that you can display the search results using news feed readers, which means you kill two birds with one stone -- a human readable display and a computer readable format.
Regards
Rod
Any comments and suggestions are very welcome!
Regards, Peter.
Peter Hollas MSc BSc(hons) (Peter.Hollas@thomson.com) Software Engineer / Systems Administrator Thomson Zoological Innovation Centre York Science Park Heslington York YO10 5DG
Tel: 01904-435113 Fax: 01904-435114
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