Markus,
We really value your opinions, as well as those of everyone else. We definitely don't want to keep you silent or force you to use a technology that you think is inappropriate. However, there is a clear divide between LSID and HTTP URI identification schemes (maybe even Handles?!?), and we need to get past that issue to progress.
If we don't reach consensus about which single identifying scheme we should all use, I see no other alternative than letting people use the identifying schemes of their choice and let the systems fight it out (come again??!?! what did I say?!?!)
Well, this idea may seem radical at first, but really the implications are not that relevant as long as-
i) we only consider LSID using HTTP proxies and a (yet to be specified) identification scheme based on HTTP URIs. ii) we representat objects in the same way regardless of identification scheme in use.
In either case (LSID with proxy and HTTP URI), the clients will always come across HTTP URIs when navigating through linked data, and thus will always use HTTP to deference the URIs and get to the object metadata. The metadata in turn will be expressed in the same way regardless of which id scheme you use (as per rule ii above). Thus, the identifying scheme used to identify an object will be almost completely transparent to clients.
There will be a few details that will make things a little different in one case or the other (only LSIDs will let you get data for an object, and so on). Those will the main reasons why one would choose one scheme over the other. In 200 years time, we will know who were right and who were wrong. But until then, we all go our separate ways, but keeping our systems interoperable.
We are now drafting an LSID Applicability Statement in which we specify the rules that must be followed by anyone using LSIDs in our community. That document, however, won't say that anyone in our community must use LSIDs. So if you want to propose an alternative identifying scheme, you suggest you do the same: draft a detailed specification for your new scheme, submit it to the TDWG standards track and put it up for review by the community. Otherwise, if we don't have a detailed spec for HTTP URIs to refer to, we will always get stuck on those what-if questions. And please follow the 2 rules I outlined above so that we keep both systems interoperable.
The same applies to handles. If anyone wants to use handles, he or she must draft a detailed applicability statement defining rules for using handles in our domain and submit it for review. But again, I would advise against handles because they won't be as interoperable with the other two schemes for the reasons I outlined in an earlier message (incompatible content-types).
I hope this helps.
Best regards,
Ricardo
Markus Döring wrote:
Donald, Ricardo,
I fully agree with you and Rod that we need to go forward as fast as possible and dont need yet another discussion. If everyone else is pleased with LSIDs I will keep silent, promised. LSIDs are better than nothing. But if we would use URLs we could go a lot faster 'cause its so much easier. Especially now after all the lessons learned.
Still some comments below inline Markus