One of the topics identified under the "LSID Infrastructure Working Group" umbrella relates to "GUID Annotation and Link-out Mechanisms" (no other comments associated with this topic at this point). So far no-one has expressed any interest in doing any work on this topic.
Basically the question is whether we should adopt any mechanisms and best practices for how a third-party data provider should serve annotations and additional data fields to be related to a data object with its own LSID and served by some other data provider. During GUID-1 Ben Szekely mentioned the annotation interfaces that had been proposed for use with LSIDs. This is a mechanism for a data provider using LSIDs to expose an interface which a third-party data provider may invoke to notify the first data provider that they are serving such annotations. It is then up to the first data provider to decide whether or not to include a reference to these annotations as part of the metadata for the LSID in question.
This is a collaborative approach which could be useful but which relies on special software at both ends, in addition to any basis LSID resolution stack. Unless a high proportion of data providers serving LSIDs install software to accept notifications of annotations and to store the appropriate external references, I do not believe that third-party data providers will find it worthwhile to establish their end of the interaction. Does anyone think otherwise?
There would seem to be two other fairly obvious approaches we could follow to manage external annotation of LSIDs:
1. We could rely simply on passive discovery of the links by crawler applications such as the GBIF data indexer - when indexing the third-party data, it would be possible to store a reference to the relationship between the objects and to offer a service allowing users to check for "additional information" on any LSID. This relies on good coverage by the crawler tools - in particular it assumes that the data objects offered by the third-party data provider belong to classes which are themselves of interest to the crawler. 2. We could establish a central service which can be invoked by anyone to assert relationships between any two LSIDs. This would take the burden of handling these notifications away from the original data providers and would provide the foundation for establishing an "additional information" service.
I therefore have two questions:
1. Are any of these options likely to be valuable enough that we should consider clarifying them, implementing any required software and services, and defining best practices? 2. (Even more importantly) Is there anyone who is sufficiently interested to take ownership of this topic?
Thanks,
Donald
--------------------------------------------------------------- Donald Hobern (dhobern@gbif.org) Programme Officer for Data Access and Database Interoperability Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark Tel: +45-35321483 Mobile: +45-28751483 Fax: +45-35321480 ---------------------------------------------------------------