2009/3/23 Paul Kirk p.kirk@cabi.org:
In fungi we have MycoBank and citing MB510023 (for Quambalaria coyrecup T. Paap 2008, for humans to read) and having a true GUID (not yet implemented) or LSID (implemented: http://lsid.tdwg.org/urn:lsid:indexfungorum.org:names:510023) 'underneath' is closer to the GenBank model which everyone accepts.
Paul
Paul,
Who will educate all biologists about the difference between the lsids and their use? And I specifically mean the non-taxonomists that use species names. In "normal" resources like PDF published articles, html species pages, Drupal or Wiki-based information, urn:lsid:indexfungorum.org:names:510023 is useful only for human display. But it will be used.
http://lsid.tdwg.org/urn:lsid:indexfungorum.org:names:510023 will work as a clickable link to a web resource and can be read by semantic web machine reasoners. But to create this, external knowledge about resolution mechanism is expected from every biologist in the world. Some help material to be found somewhere may instruct them: if in your publication you want to create a link that is usable by humans or semantic web machine reasoners, you have to convert the lsid by prefixing it with http://lsid.tdwg.org/, http://lsid.gbif.org/, or perhaps lsid.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/.
The mistrust in http current URL management practices is certainly valid. But this is a social issue, not a technical. The mistrust into http as a protocol I consider invalid: who is willing to bet that http will disappear before urn:lsid? And we would simply introduce resolver THEN (p2k5://http.tdwg.org/http://persistent-identifier.indexfungorum.org/names/510023).
:-)
Gregor