My off-the-cuff comment was inspired by seeing a tag <doi> in the ontology. If you have DOIs, why not Handles, or any other GUID? Personally I would just use dc:identifier
If I'm not mistaken, this is more or less exactly the same conclusion that we canme to at the St. Louis TDWG-Lit meeting recently. I.e., don't single out DOIs, but deal with identifiers in a more generic way.
What if the proxy goes away?
In the case of LSIDs, this was my rationale for using the same domain name for the HTTP proxy as for the LSID authority -- the idea being that they will both live or die in synchrony.
Is there an expectation that the proxied version will serve RDF?
I would like to keep the options open on that -- or at least allow for an HTTP proxy that can return something other than RDF (e.g., HTML) -- at least as an option.
- Have a global proxy server for all classes of identifiers
that we might have, and have this return RDF (and do 303 redirects, or whatever the Semantic Web community settle on). This was the motivation behind my experiments with http://bioguid.info .
I think (and have always thought) that this is an excellent and badly-needed service. I just want the option of setting up my own HTTP proxy that can return something other than RDF (i.e., I'd rather avoid the presumption that all HTTP proxies for GUIDs are assumed to return RDF).
Rich