On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 6:25 PM, Dave Vieglais <vieglais@ku.edu> wrote:

I'm not sure if anyone has suggested this strategy (I'll be surprised
if not):

TDWG seems determined to use LSIDs for GUIDs, yet the technical issues
for implementation are discouraging enough for some to defer
deployment. Perhaps TDWG could offer as a bonus for membership (or
perhaps a small additional charge) the provision of some elements of
the LSID infrastructure stack, overloading the tdwg.org domain?

Then, instead of having each institution create DNS entries such as
"mydepartment.institution.org" and deal with the SRV details, use TDWG
as a kind of registrar and do something like
"mycollectionid.tdwg.org". TDWG would then be responsible for the
appropriate DNS SRV registration, and could even operate a resolver
and/or redirection service for that domain.

The income would not be very much (say $10/year per org * 100
participants = $1k), but it should be a lot less expensive for the
entire community than the total cost for each organization operating
their own infrastructure (perhaps $10/year DNS + $1000/year operations
* 100 participants = $101k).

So as not to overload the TDWG infrastructure, it would be sensible to
encourage technically astute groups (e.g. GBIF, EoL, NCEAS) to
contribute computing cycles and fallback DNS services to ensure
reliability of the entire system.

The end result could be a reliable, distributed infrastructure for
LSID (or whatever GUID scheme is decided upon) resolution that
conforms to the requirements / specifications derived from the TDWG
procedures at a small cost for participation. The low cost and
deferral of technical overhead to a knowledgeable group would
hopefully encourage participation by a broader audience in this piece
of fundamental architecture.

(It may also help reduce the endless cycles of discussion about GUIDs
and LSIDs)

Dave V.
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