Dear Chuck,
Nobody that I'm aware of is suggesting replacing the DNS (least of all me). Any solution that gets implement anytime soon will of course use the Internet. Handles use the Internet in their current implementation, indeed anytime you look up a DOI, or follow a link in a journal that's marked "CrossRef", you use handles.
It's just that:
(a) I'm a little wary of including Internet addresses in GUIDs, more because the implied link to a site may disappear if the site dies/moves/changes name. Yes there are mechanisms to deal with this, but having an Internet address has the potential to mislead. Imagine if records served by MOBOT start to get served by, say, the New York Botanical Garden. What will users think of resolving an LSID with mobot.org in the name and getting a different server. A generation brought up with phishing scams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing), and taught to check a URL is really what it says it is might get nervous.
(b) I'm not seriously arguing the DNS or the Internet are going away anytime soon, however I think it is interesting that this is a concern voiced by the people who are probably closest to us in mindset - digital librarians. They care deeply about curation, have rare, old, culturally valuable artefacts, and want systems that persist beyond current fashions and/or technologies. Sound familiar? If so, let's ask why have they gone for things like handles?
Regards
Rod
On 28 Jan 2006, at 14:25, Chuck Miller wrote:
Although the Internet may change in the future and none of us have a crystal ball, some method for turning names (gbif.org) into network addresses (192.38.28.79) will be required. For the forseeable future that method on the Internet will almost certainly be DNS. The cascade of the global DNS server network is key to making the Internet work. No matter what URL you put into your browser, the DNS network finds its way to the IP address of the server. Trillions of dollars of commerce now depend upon this global standard. I think the analogy is more like the teletype machines and the ASCII codes they used. Although we have Unicode now, it still includes ASCII. In communications, the new must continue to support the old. This can be seen in the W3C projects that continue to build upon the previous standards.
To replace the Internet's global DNS locator service with something unique to biodiversity seems like a complex, expensive and long-term proposition. For the sake of getting things done in a timely manner, I think we need to keep things simple and leverage the pieces of the puzzle that already work. Implementing a GUID scheme is going to be tough enough without tackling a replacement for DNS.
An issue that needs to be decided by the workshop is how much "abstraction" of a GUID is absolutely necessry if it must also be locatable through the Internet? That is, is a compromise needed to allow embedding of domain names in order to enable use of the DNS to locate GUIDs. Surely there is insufficient time, funds, and staff to embark upon creation of a master switchboard (database) where the locations of millions of GUIDs are recorded and updated in perpetuity.
Chuck Miller Missouri Botanical Garden
-----Original Message----- From: Roderic Page To: TDWG-GUID@LISTSERV.NHM.KU.EDU Sent: 1/28/2006 2:58 AM Subject: Re: [TDWG-GUID] identifiers for geologic samples
On 28 Jan 2006, at 01:02, Richard Pyle wrote:
The more I think about it, the more I think this is the sort of
system
that would work well for our field. A centralized issuer (which could
issue
blocks of thousands or millions of numbers at a time),
The major problem I see with this is that a central registry may be a rate limiting step because it has to allocate blocks, it would also decide for format of the last part of the identifier (which the provider might not find desirable), and it may well lead to lots of wasted identifiers (e.g., it allocates 100,000 to me, but I use 3 off them).
Would it not be better to devolve this? You can still have a central registry. For example, Handles and DOIs work by having a central registry for the prefix (e.g., "1018") and the provider is responsible for allocating the suffix locally.
I'm not sure how wise it would be to create a new syntax standard, rather than go with one of the ones we've discussed. But if (for example) using LSID, I personally think it would be preferable to establish a highly generic form, such as:
urn:lsid:gbif.org:BioGUID:12345
Without wishing to preempt some of the things I'm going to present at the workshop, I'm going off LSIDs a little because of their reliance on the Internet DNS. Apart from the hassle of mucking with the DNS records to set them up (I suspect not every provider is going to find this easy to do), it assumes that the Internet its present form is going to be here forever, and it also embeds information in the identifier (e.g., "gbif.org") that currently has meaning, but over time may loose meaning, or worse, be positively misleading (say if GBIF goes belly up and somebody else serves the data).
Handles (including DOIs) and ARK have no information in the identifier (perhaps not strictly true for some DOIs, but that's by choice not design), and also in principle don't need the internet. In the future some other mode of information transport may come along, and they could still be used.
While it might be hard to imagine the Internet and the DNS going away, if anybody has a 5 1/4" floppy lying around, they'll be aware of how hard it is to get information off it these days as 5 1/4" drives are scarce as hens teeth -- the only one in my department is in an old PC that is connected to the network. The digital library community seem particularly sensitive to these issues, which is perhaps why they use handles, DOIs, and ARK.
Regards
Rod
Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
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------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species at http://ispecies.org