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:
I therefore have two questions:
Thanks,
Donald
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Donald Hobern (dhobern@gbif.org)
Programme Officer for Data Access and Database Interoperability
Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat
Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100
Tel: +45-35321483
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