Probably no one knew about it, but TDWG did offer to help with this (for free) for a long time (since Aug 2007), but no one took it up I believe:
http://www.tdwg.org/activities/online-services/lsid-authority-ids/
I think the idea is worth exploring further. Perhaps a quick "hands up who wants this?" vote to canvas interest?
Crazy idea: I would propose taking it further and suggesting "centralising" a cache of the LSID response also (configurable expiry date on items in the cache), to alleviate load on servers (thinking of IPNI for example). It would not be drastically expensive to offer a billion LSID cache with high availability with cloud computing ("centralised" in the sense that it is on a distributed cloud such as Amazon S3 + Cloudfront). We could share Amazon S3 as a data store and everyone just pays for their own PUT cost ($0.01 for 1000 records) and then share the bandwidth cost. I think this is worth exploring regardless of GUID technology used... What was it Rod said - "distributed begets centralized"
Tim
On 28 Apr 2009, at 10:09, Robert Huber wrote:
Dear Dave,
Good to read something about this issue in this list! I like the idea, it reminds a bit on how handle and/or doi manage this. The doi system allows registrants to act as doi resellers, and this is working. Prices vary, but e.g. for packages of several thousand dois are sold for an annual fee (http://www.medra.org/en/terms.htm) or for free (http://www.std-doi.de). Unless someone does it for free (GBIF?), selling LSIDs could be part of the business model for TDWG?. And in analogy to the handle system, a fee for registering some blabla.tdwg.org subdomain (was it authority?) as you mentioned would surely help to make the whole LSID SYSTEM more persistent.
Well, and I hope LSID registrant(s) would manage the metadata issue better than the DOI system does. Most people ignore that while doi registrants do have to register dois+metadata there is no common way to retrieve this metadata. Crossref, which is mentioned frequently here, does not hold the metadata on any doi but only on those dois they registered. Try to get some metadata for example for some dois of the other registrants such as doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.339110.
best regards, Robert
On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 12:25 AM, 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. _______________________________________________ tdwg-tag mailing list tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tag
-- Dr. Robert Huber,
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