Rod and Sally,
Thanks for your posts, they are very helpful!
I agree that for ZooBank it's probably best to just return metadata instead of data, as at the moment we don't have any useful such as holotype photos. Indeed I thought that we could just link to them using an RDF resource anyway.
Our decision to go with TCS/RDF was largely based on the flexibility it offers. Often we don't have any information about a name other than the name itself and classification (such as a higher taxa like "animalia"). TCS doesn't impose restrictions on which fields must be included, and seems to fit much better to the datasets we have. I'm sure that we'll be including Dublic Core where possible too.
Once I get something up and running I'll post some example endpoints for comment.
Regards, Peter.
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu] On Behalf Of Roderic Page Sent: 22 September 2006 13:18 To: tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Zoobank LSID Service
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
TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid
------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html iChat: aim://rodpage1962 reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names: http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species: http://ispecies.org Rod's rants on phyloinformatics: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Rod's rants on ants: http://semant.blogspot.com
_______________________________________________ TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid