This is probably slightly off the topic, but in the case of literature there are two GUIDs already available for many recent papers: DOIs assigned by publishers, and PubMed ids assigned by NCBI (I think we can treat the later as GUIDs, especially if we wrap them in LSIDs as done by the Biopathways Consortium).
Of course, an electronic version of a paper, and its abstract stored in another database are not the same thing (at least, not electronically). This is an example were a simple cross reference can link the two GUIDs (in many cases, the PubMed record provides this cross reference).
Regarding mapping between GUIDs, I suspect the mapping may get very complicated, and a simple tree might not be appropriate. Attached is an example of relationships between names in MOBOT, based on RDF I generate for LSIDs for MOBOT names.
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
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/
