On Apr 3, 2009, at 1:23 PM, Peter DeVries wrote:
[...] 3) LSIDs increase the implementation costs significantly beyond the costs required for domain registration and a web server.
I think you'll find plenty of people who will argue that the cost of minting persistent GUIDs is much higher than the cost of a web server and domain registration in any event, and that it might be a Good Thing(tm) if an identifier system doesn't pretend otherwise.
[...] 4) Tim Berners-Lee feels that LSIDs are unnecessary, and after spending several years looking at this issue I think he is right. Even if TBL is wrong, you have positioned yourself for an uphill battle for adoption.
He has been wrong before. More to the point, I don't think this has to matter. In 1998 he would have probably said that DOIs are unnecessary. They may indeed be, from a technological standpoint, but from a social and business (sustainability) standpoint they've clearly been hugely successful. So I think the question that matters much more is, is there (or will there be) a similar ecosystem and environment for LSIDs that will make them equally useful. That's what I'm less sure about.
Also, I think we ought not to confuse one use-case for GUIDs (such as linked data) with the requirements for an identifier system for biodiversity.
-hilmar
BTW if anyone feels this is a long discussion that has been had before, check out the thread that begins with "registering info: uris" on the Code4Lib list (http://www.mail-archive.com/code4lib% 40listserv.nd.edu/) It turns out they struggle with similar questions (and also not for the first time), except in a library context, which might be much closer to a museum context than a semweb research community.