Dear Arthur,
tracing the transfer of biological specimen among collections on different locations and - by extension - tracking all the downstream information that has been collected on a given specimen by different people provides many scenarios that can be neatly resolved by using a solid UID/ontology framework. Here's a use-case that shows you some examples in the microbial domain (among others) that comes pretty close to the two scenarios that you were drawing
Over 500 collections around the world (bacteria, archaea, filamentous fungi, yeast) have been registered at the World Data Centre for Microorganisms (http://lmg.ugent.be/~pdawyndt/maps/world_collections.html), which is the data center of the World Federation of Culture Collections. The StrainInfo.net portal system (http://www.straininfo.net) enables simple navigation through all collections from a single entry point (access to the portal is currently restricted, use 'guest' as login and 'straininfo' as password).
For each specimen (eg. try "LMG 6923", a bacterial specimen), the portal system offers the following services to the user:
1. a list of cultures of the same specimen in other collections around the world. Multiple resolution is provided to the related entry in the online catalogs of the culture collections, providing further background information on the specimen 2. a complete history of the specimen, showing its transfer among different collections ever since its original isolation (http://lmg.ugent.be/~pdawyndt/maps/history.pdf) 3. a list of sequences in EMBL/GenBank/DDBJ. Remark that the public sequence databases score poorly in their support of searching sequences for a given specimen 4. a list of literature references of studies that use the given specimen 5. geographic distribution of the collections where the given specimen can be ordered
All these services and the information system that goes behind the StrainInfo.net portal strongly build on unique identifiers and a extensive network of object-relationships. To keep pace with updated information sources, the information system perpetually finds new objects (and automatically assigns unique identifiers to them if they are not in place; i.e. accumulative learning) and discovers all sorts relationships between these objects (built on top of the unique identifiers). This requires an expert system that is tightly coupled to an extensible domain-related ontology (what is what, and how should it be recognized in the light of synonymy, homology, syntactical variation). The good thing is that all of this complexity remains pretty much hidden for the end-user.
Hopefully, this sketches somewhat the possibilities of the GUID/ontology frameworks that are envisioned in this mailing list
Cheers,
Peter
Further reading:
Dawyndt P, Vancanneyt M, De Meyer H, Swings J. Knowledge Accumulation and Resolution of Data Inconsistencies during the Integration of Microbial Information Sources. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 17(8), pp. 1111-1126, 2005.
Romano P, Dawyndt P, Piersigilli F, Swings J. Improving interoperability between microbial information and sequence databases. BMC Bioinformaticsi, 6(4), S23, 2005. doi:10.1186/1471-2105-6-S4-S23.
----------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Peter Dawyndt
Laboratory of Microbiology Ghent University Ledeganckstraat 35 B-9000 Gent, Belgie Tel.: (32)9.264.51.32 Fax.: (32)9.264.50.92
KERMIT -- Research Unit "Knowledge-based Systems" Ghent University Coupure links 653 B-9000 Gent, Belgie Tel.: (32)9.264.60.18
Email: Peter.Dawyndt@UGent.be -----------------------------------------------------------