Re: Taxon debate synthesis?

Hi Ricardo

I think we should really have one GUID system for anything.
For one, a single GUID system will favor integration within and

across domains. For example, if you get a GUID somewhere, you don't

need

to figure out which GUID system you use to resolve it, you just

resolve

it within the one GUID system and get metadata describing the object. Can be a taxon concept, which can have GUIDs linking it to specimens

and

observation data, which in turn can be resolved using the same architecture.

I agree this is easier for us to implement - I think I mentioned that but I don't think that's always the right reason for doing something.

Second, I tend to think that such a system will work better if the

assigning authorities are descentralized, i.e. agents are free to

assign

GUIDs to anything.

The only issue here - and I don't think there is an easy answer - is the trade off between easy issuing of GUIDs and difficulty of knowing what you get back from them, what you can do with them and which GUIDs are of real value....I guess what you're saying is let the users decide that even if they don't really know what the issues are. I'd like to for example decide that if IPNI issue TaxonNames GUIDs then I can decide wholesale to accept that they've done a good job and know they are names, know they are not concepts, know what I will get and therefore what I can do with them - I don't really want to have to figure that out somehow at run-time.

What controls the caos in this case are the metadata services. You

can issue GUIDs right and left, but then what will add value to them

is

how you cross link them and maybe more importantly, how the community uses the objects you issued GUIDs for (again this relates to cross linking objects).

I can understand this to some extent but (possibly because of my ignorance) can't quite see how this will work. I'm a little confused about what say IPNI or TROPICOS would do here - I'm imagining they would issues GUIDs for what they have in their databases....how would this work and how and who would cross link their GUIDs. What would they issue GUIDs for? How would we refer to their concepts or names? What would we get returned I'm not sure from this proposal. TCS relies on lots of cross linking but all of the cross linking for one concept is encapsulated within the one concept (and thereby GUID). So for example we differentiate between relationships which were mentioned in the definition of that concept between the concept and other concepts, and relationships by others regarding that concept which are opinions of others and not part of the definition of the concept as defined. How would we do that?

Third, if you want, you still can have a centralized metadata

service that works like an authority saying which taxon GUIDs are important. I just don't think you can enforce data correctness at the issuing authority level.

Yes if I was clear about what I was getting if I resolved a taxon GUID. I'm still not entirely clear what we're getting back. I agree you can't enforce correctness at the issuing authority level but I think you can set up agreements as to what your protocol for publishing is and what you will do with your objects that you have assigned GUIDs to etc.

Can anyone tell me come to think about it what we are planning on providing here? If anyone can issue GUIDs (I guess using their own GUID server) for any taxon thing - or really anything that anybody wants to consider a taxon thing. What "extra" value are we talking about providing?

Regarding your comment that computers can't handle metadata, I

think

we need to explore that a little bit more with examples. Could some of us in the group present more concrete examples on how something like that would be done? I think that if we define one or more ontologies (i.e. a classification scheme for things getting GUIDs) computers can than say: I know what the class this object belongs to, it's a NameUsage, or a TissueFromSpecimen, and act upon it. If the system doesn't know what kind of object that is, it can just ignore it or try to render it using a xslt stylesheet that can be used to displays that content to the user (if that's available).

I guess what I was trying to get at here is - does the metadata tell me what kind of object I'm getting or does it contain the data (or at least some of the data) that I've been thinking is the values for the concept. I'm confused about that after reading some of the posts.

I don't want to stop us progressing but I want to be sure that where we're going is going to add some value to what is out there already.

Thanks,

Jessie

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