1. Building mission-critical stuff around a single point of failure without distributed replicated redundancy is amateurish, ultimately doomed to failure, and I am amazed that everybody does it. The drive for an easy solution with smart response times wins every time. IMO, the Australia's Virtual Herbarium took a step backward when it moved from a distributed to a cached solution without building in fail-over redundancy. Yes, the new version is quicker but when it does not work you are clean out of luck. If we are going to build anything that is going to become mission-critical and expect people to use it, then I want more than one of them.
2. is an admirable aspiration and it is starting to look like a project or service home in the US is not a good idea until they relax these absurd regional access policies for public good science, environment and cultural endeavours. Intercontinental replication could fix this. It would not, as you point out, address individual country's domestic access policies. But hey, that is not TDWG's problem.
3. TDWG internal and external contradiction is pretty much ubiquitous and it has always been thus. Achieving integrity between projects and standards is perhaps one of TDWG's biggest challenges. There is probably not a lot new that has to be invented, but there is a mountain that has to be pulled together. I am looking at you, rdfy vocabulary ontology thingy... ;)
4. Probably. If they were considered at all.
5. Greg Whitbread's pun's are indeed atrocious and there is absolutely nothing we have been able to do about them. On behalf of a nation, I apologize... :)
jim
On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Roderic Pager.page@bio.gla.ac.uk wrote:
OK, the message I'm getting is that:
- It's perfectly acceptable for the public face of a major
biodiversity informatics project to be broken in a way that makes us look amateurish.
- TDWG must guarantee universal analysis at all times (even thought
China may, on a whim, ban access to any site it choses).
- That TDWG is already using Google Code for Darwin Core (http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/
) is, of course, irrelevant to this discussion, as is the fact that Google Code seems fine for GBIF (http://code.google.com/p/gbif-ecat/ ) and EOL (http://code.google.com/p/eol-website/ ) projects.
- Nobody thought these issues were important when the original
project was set up on SourceForge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge ).
- That Greg Whitbread's puns are appalling.
I'm clearly too worked up about this, but all I'm looking for is a simple fix to a simple problem. Instead, we're off on some tangent about incorporation, instead of actually dealing with the issue at hand. Perhaps I shouldn't get too bothered, and take this discussion as tacit agreement that LSIDs are doomed anyway.
Regards
Rod
Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy DEEB, FBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
Email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
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