I've put a preprint of a manuscript entitled "bioGUID: resolving, discovering, and minting identifiers for biodiversity informatics" online at Nature Precedings: http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2009.3079.1 The manuscript covers some of the issues discussed in this thread. Irony alert: 1. The manuscript has a handle (hdl:10101/npre.2009.3079.1) as it's GUID 2. As I write, http://precedings.nature.com is down 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