Dear Rich, I guess I'd argue the reverse, in that pumping data out with unique identifiers demonstrably doesn't get us very far. We've had "globally unique", "persistent", and "actionable" identifiers for years (LSIDs, URLs, DOIs, etc.) and very little to show for it. In other words, there isn't a biodiversity informatics "matrix" to "plug in" to. Building a "cross-mapping service" is not necessarily simple, again because the individual data providers rarely use existing identifiers for things outside their domain. Hence we have text strings for literature when perfectly good identifiers exist. The benefits of the "matrix" come from the links, and we aren't providing them. The notion this is all going to magically coalesce at some unspecified point in the future strikes me as wishful thinking. Someone is soon going to point out that the Emperor has no clothes... Regards Rod On 23 Feb 2012, at 21:09, Richard Pyle wrote:
Hi All,
As I've said many times before, the "shared" bit is useful, but far less important than the "globally unique", "persistent", and "actionable" bits. As Kevin says, we can handle the non-shared GUIDs (as long as they meet the other three criteria) by simply building a cross-mapping service; but that's only useful to the extent that the identifiers are truly unique, persistent, and actionable (in that order of importance).
Once we have a real infrastructure that achieves critical mass of adoption for integrating the silos, then I'm sure eventually our community will converge toward shared identifiers (specifically, towards the ones that are most robustly persistent, and provide the best services when actioned upon), and the superfluous identifiers will eventually fade into becoming historical metadata (like NODC numbers in the context of ITIS).
But without an infrastructure to get people to come out of their silos and "plug in" to the biodiversity informatics "matrix", it's unlikely that we'll ever get to the point of collapsing multiple identical GUIDs into a single shared GUID for the same object.
Aloha, Rich
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag- bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Kevin Richards Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2012 9:41 AM To: Roderic Page; TDWG TAG Subject: Re: [tdwg-tag] Specimen identifiers
I agree Rod, it would be ideal to have unique, shared identifiers for specimens, and as many other types of data as possible. The problem here is the "shared" bit. This is what most people hope for and hoped would come out of all the GUID and vocabulary work that has been done. But you know how hard it is to get different projects, organisations, datasets to really share IDs. Pretty much impossible, so I have moved on from this dream and hope to solve this more by linkages, linked data type approaches instead.
Another problem is what the identifier refers to. As someone (I think Rich) said in a recent post, two different people may apply the same identifier to slightly different things - eg to the "name" of a person, or to the "person" itself. This is another barrier to reuse of shared identifiers. You may think that specimens should be very simple, it is just a specimen that you refer to, but there can be subtle differences, for example if someone has data about the accessioned physical specimen and another has an image of that specimen - they could both well say that they are discussing the same specimen so give these two "different" objects the same identifier.
Kevin
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag- bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Roderic Page Sent: Thursday, 23 February 2012 11:38 p.m. To: TDWG TAG Subject: [tdwg-tag] Specimen identifiers
I've recently written an number of posts on the implications of the lack of specimen-level identifiers, which makes it very hard to link different sources of data together, such as GBIF and Genbank http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2012/02/linking-gbif-and-genbank.html , and are also a factor in creating duplicate records in GBIF http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-many-specimens-does-gbif- really.html
I know this is something of a hobby horse of mine, but we can have all the wonderful ontologies and vocabularies we want, if we don't have globally unique, shared identifiers to glue this stuff together we are going to find ourselves making yet more silos...
Regards
Rod
--------------------------------------------------------- Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
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--------------------------------------------------------- Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK Email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk Tel: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 AIM: rodpage1962@aim.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html