I like this compromise Rod. But I think that it is time to give up on the concept of multiple identifiers.
The existing TDWG recommendation that '5. All references to LSIDs within RDF documents should use the proxified form', basically states that LSID will never appear in any way other than bundled into an http URI - if we are also to publish data as RDF.
That sounds as if it means that those wanting to use LSID resolution will first have to extract the LSID part from the http URI which will now appear everywhere we would expect to find our unique identifier.
Donald has presented a strong case for unique identifiers conforming to the LSID specification but we have now an equally strong case that in its http form our identifier must behave as a dereferenceable URN per W3C linked data recommendations.
Acceptance of this requirement will impact on existing services expecting RDF back from the proxy service without content negotiation and require update of TDWG GUID policy and recommendations so it is important that we try to get this sorted here as soon as possible.
greg
2009/4/10 Roderic Page r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk:
In a rare attempt at being constructive, here are a few thoughts.
LSIDs and linked data
If adoption of LSIDs proceeds, then we should make efforts to see that they play nicely with Linked Data efforts. For example, a HTTP resolver would need to support 303 redirects and content negotiation. This help avoid us creating our own ghetto, but still exploit whatever advantages LSIDs have.
Roger set up something along these lines to handle Biological Collections Index (BioCol) LSIDs. There is a nice tool at http://validator.linkeddata.org/ to check whether a URI behaves as Linked Data tools expect. Sadly the proxied BioCol LSIDs (e.g., http://biocol.org/urn:lsid:biocol.org:col:15670 ) don't validate, but this should be easy to fix. The TDWG resolver similarly fails.
I've implemented a simple resolver at bioGUID that returns either raw RDF or a clumsily formatted HTML version of the XML, but which passes the http://validator.linkeddata.org tests. An example URI is http://bioguid.info/urn:lsid:indexfungorum.org:names:213649 , which validates http://tinyurl.com/cgje5n
So, my first recommendation is to ensure that a TDWG HTTP proxy passes http://validator.linkeddata.org/ . This means we can play with the Semantic Web crowd with LSIDs.
Note that getting HTTP URIs to play with Linked Data is not trivial, so whatever technology we adopt we'll need clear guidelines as to how to use it. As an aside bioGUID can make DOIs play nice as well (they don't by default), and Kinglsey Idehen http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/ ~kidehen/ of OpenLink Software is supporting LSIDs in the Linked Data tools he's developing.
Ontology
As part of my experiment to wikify taxonomic names, literature, etc., I've been playing with the TDWG vocabularies. I've a few grizzles, but in general they've been really useful, and I think these will be key (as Donald and Lee have emphasised).
Service
Ironically one of the examples Lee listed when defending the TDWG's resolver (urn:lsid:gdb.org:GenomicSegment:GDB132938) seems to have disappeared (I think TDWG has a cached copy). This raises the ongoing problem of service availability. TDWG's resolver could help here, in that could be used to generate reports on service quality and notify providers when something's wrong. Whatever GUID technology adopted this will be an issue, and the challenge is to build tools and mechanisms to manage this.
Funding
I've nothing useful to say here, other than to suggest that clearly the integration of biodiversity data sales pitch hasn't (yet?) succeeded. I think us techies get it, but we've not made that vision real or compelling. If we had, I think we'd have institutions falling over themselves to ensure the infrastructure exists and persists. Naive, I know, but we could ask why we haven't managed to convince those with the purse strings that this stuff matters.
One quick and dirty way that might help is if the TDWG LSID resolver stored all the metadata in the LSIDs it resolves in a triple store and exposes a SPARQL query interface to that metadata. We could then start to look for interesting links between data.
Regards
Rod
Roderic Page Professor of Taxonomy DEEB, FBLS 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
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