On 6 Jun 2007, at 22:50, Dave Vieglais wrote:
Perhaps an adequate solution is to use LSIDs and provide definitive guidelines indicating how they can be embedded in URLs so that we do not loose interoperability with the rest of the world? This is probably much like Ricardo's LSID proxy proposal. Except in my opinion it should be extended further to be a general GUID resolver to help resolve whatever form is used for GUIDs - then one could embed a handle, LSID, HTTP URI, FTP URI, LDAP URI, or even, for the ancients of the internet, z39.50 URIs in a resolver proxy URL and get something back. The problem of course is that the content that comes back will be different for different protocols - but it would, I suspect be possible to provide a generic form of metadata for the different protocols.
This is pretty much what http://bioguid.info does with respect to DOIs, Handles, PubMed identifiers, and (some) specimens. I haven't added LSIDs to this, but have code to do so (as part of another project).
bioGUID returns RDF/XML for a GUID, displayed as HTML in a browser using an embedded style sheet ("view source" reveals the RDF). Any links to other GUIDs are rewritten as "bioGUIDs", that is, resolvable by http://bioguid.info. bioGUID supports 303 redirect to play nice with Semantic Web tools (most of which, it has to be said, suck).
Some examples are:
http://bioguid.info/doi:10.1109/mis.2006.62 [ DOI] http://bioguid.info/casent:0008682-d03 [specimen] http://bioguid.info/pmid:17213318 [PubMed] http://bioguid.info/genbank:AY324464 [DNA sequence, with link to bioGUID for specimen and publication]
The original idea was to cache the RDF to speed up subsequent calls, and also to discover new links between GUIDs. This part stalled due to my trying to extract whatever I could from GenBank records, such as specimen links and DOIs if there is no PubMed record (see http:// bioguid.blogspot.com/2007/04/adding-guids-to-genbank-records.html for details). This led to work on reference parsing and OpenURL, but that's another story (http://ispiders.blogspot.com/2007/06/gimme-that- scientific-paper.html).
Hence, my own response to this thread would be to add LSID support to bioGUID, and continue to play with linking all these GUIDs together.
Regards
Rod
---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom
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