Yesterday was a vacation here in Denmark - otherwise I'd have responded a little earlier, but I'm glad to see all the comments from others. I thoroughly agree with Kevin, Jason, Rich and Anna. No one here believes that any particular solution is going to be perfect. Our biggest need is consensus and the readiness to get going with a workable solution.
I do recognise the strength of Rod's arguments. Indeed, if I were building some system for integrating data using semantic web technologies, and my only concern was ensuring the efficiency of synchronous connections now, I am sure I would adopt HTTP URIs for the purpose. However I remain convinced (as I've stated before) that the needs of this community do subtly shift the balance in another direction. We are interested in maintaining long-term connections between our objects and have a perspective which goes back hundreds of years. This at least should give us pause over whether we want our specimens to be referenced using identifiers so firmly tied to the Internet of today. More importantly, one of the key drivers right at the beginning of TDWG's consideration of GUIDs was that the community had plenty of experience of URL rot and didn't want to rely on everyone maintaining stable virtual directories on their web servers to preserve the integrity of object identifiers.
Both LSIDs and HTTP URIs could be made to work for us. Both are totally reliant on good practice on the part of data owners. Personally I believe our chances of getting the community to consider, define and apply such practices are enhanced by the identifier technology being something a little more different and distinct than just a "special URL".
I agree with Jason. It is not the GUID that is the cause of all the problems here - THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH LSIDS - we just need to move on and start using them in our own context (or any other suitable GUID - LSIDs are only the recommended GUID, NOT the only premissable GUID).
If it all falls to pieces later on we could just do a search and replace to change all our GUIDs to some other scheme (to quote Bob, just serious).
I agree, it is the RDF/metadata/ontologies that are the key to getting things working well.
Kevin
Rod,
I've only had a chance to quickly skim the documents you reference, but it seems to me that the alternatives to LSIDs don't necessarily make the issues with which we are wrestling go away. We still need to decide WHAT a URI references - is it the metadata, the physical object etc? URIs don't explicitly require persistance, while LSIDs do so I see that as a positive for adopting a standard GUID that is explicit in that regard. I think the TDWG effort to spec an HTTP proxy for LSIDs makes it clear that the technical hurdles of implementing an LSID resolver (SVR records, new protocol, client limitations etc) are a bit cumbersome, but I don't think the underlying concept is fatally flawed. In reading these discussions, I'm starting to believe/understand that RDF may hold the key, regardless of the GUID that is implemented. Now I have to go read up more on RDF to see if my new-found belief has merit! ;)
Jason
________________________________
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 2:10 PM
To: Chuck Miller
Subject: Re: [tdwg-guid] First step in implementing LSIDs?[Scanned]
Maybe it's time to bite the bullet and consider the elephant in the room -- LSIDs might not be what we want. Markus Döring sent some nice references to the list in April, which I've repeated below, there is also
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MIS.2006.62 .
I think the LSID debate is throwing up issues which have been addressed elsewhere (e.g., identifiers for physical things versus digital records), and some would argue have been solved to at least some people's satisfaction.
LSIDs got us thinking about RDF, which is great. But otherwise I think they are making things more complicated than they need to be. I think this community is running a grave risk of committing to a technology that nobody else takes that seriously (hell, even the
http://lsid.sourceforge.net/ web site is broken).
The references posted by Markus Döring were:
"Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" by Leo Sauermann DFKI GmbH, Richard Cyganiak Freie Universität Berlin (D2R author), Max Völkel FZI Karlsruhe
The authors of this document come from the semantic web community and discuss what kind of URIs should be used for RDF resources.
This one here is written by the W3C and addresses the questions "When should URNs or URIs with novel URI schemes be used to name information resources for the Web?" The answers given are "Rarely if ever" and "Probably not". Common arguments in favor of such novel naming schemas are examined, and their properties compared with those of the existing http: URI scheme.
Regards
Rod
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