On 6/2/07, Weitzman, Anna WEITZMAN@si.edu wrote:
[... 7 examples omitted]
Either each of these (1-7) will need to have its own LSID (or an equivalent in the case of the specimen itself) or they will all need to have the same LSID. If the former, they will all have to resolve to the same parent LSID--is this for the specimen or the record in its home database?--in order for the overall biodiversity information system to really work.
Two different objects cannot have the same LSID by definition. [This is more or less the sole overarching point of GUIDs].
I don't know what is meant by "parent LSID", but TDWG requires that an LSID resolution service return its metadata in RDF, the Resource Description Framework semantic web language. By its design, RDF is especially good at expressing relations between things it describes, so there is plenty of room for the LSID metadata to express whatever relations between these examples each of its resolution services might wish to. Furthermore, the emergent TDWG ontology standards (see TDWG-TAG) support some particularly convenient ways to do this, should the various interest groups be motivated to visit this question. That would be Good Thing, so that different resolvers of similar objects might actually offer similar, or at least as to relations, easily comparable, metadata. Still, each subgroup is likely to need to thrash these issues out separately. The TCS group is historically ahead of everybody else in this regard, since they expressed a fixed set of relations among Taxon Concepts more or less ab initio.