Yes, that was my instinctive response to the suggestion to use UUIDs at TDWG. They are easy and may help, but they have distinctive disadvantages.
From a recent discussion with Tim, and having just been to the sem web conference (http://iswc2008.semanticweb.org) , I am also rather unsure about LSIDs in their pure form, in that they are not at all semantic web friendly - ie they cannot be resolved using default HTTP resolution. The idea of using the http proxy version of the LSIDs is a good way to get around this, but this does have some drawbacks:
- 1st you really need everyone to agree to use it everywhere, which is a bit difficult considering it is not at all part of the LSID standard, and we struggle to get "everyone" to do anything
- 2nd, it seems very much like a hack - you might as well just use permanent http urls - ie the main advantage of LSIDs in this case is the "encouraging a degree of thought before making URIs publically available". But we don't really need to pick up the whole LSID overhead just to achieve this.
So it seems to me like good old Plain Old URLs are just great! : -)
Or at least the suggestion of REST styled, permanent HTTP URLs as GUIDs ???
Kevin
From: tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Roger Hyam
Sent: Friday, 21 November 2008 3:34 a.m.
To: Technical Architecture Group mailing list
Subject: [tdwg-tag] Blog: UUIDs may be Dangerous
Hi All,
I took a couple of days off but couldn't help thinking about GUIDs and UUIDs especially after the various discussion that were had in Fremantle. I have written these up in a blog here:
in case you are interested,
Your thoughts are always welcome.
Roger
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Roger Hyam
Roger@BiodiversityCollectionsIndex.org
http://www.BiodiversityCollectionsIndex.org
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Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
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