Rod,
I've only had a chance to quickly skim the documents
you reference, but it seems to me that the alternatives to LSIDs don't
necessarily make the issues with which we are wrestling go away. We still need
to decide WHAT a URI references - is it the metadata, the physical object etc?
URIs don't explicitly require persistance, while LSIDs do so I see that as a
positive for adopting a standard GUID that is explicit in that regard. I think
the TDWG effort to spec an HTTP proxy for LSIDs makes it clear that the
technical hurdles of implementing an LSID resolver (SVR records, new protocol,
client limitations etc) are a bit cumbersome, but I don't think the
underlying concept is fatally flawed. In reading these discussions, I'm starting
to believe/understand that RDF may hold the key, regardless of the GUID that is
implemented. Now I have to go read up more on RDF to see if my new-found belief
has merit! ;)
Jason
Maybe it's time to bite the bullet and consider the elephant in the
room -- LSIDs might not be what we want. Markus Döring sent some nice
references to the list in April, which I've repeated below, there is
also http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MIS.2006.62
.
I think the LSID debate is throwing up issues which have been addressed
elsewhere (e.g., identifiers for physical things versus digital records), and
some would argue have been solved to at least some people's satisfaction.
LSIDs got us thinking about RDF, which is great. But otherwise I think
they are making things more complicated than they need to be. I think this
community is running a grave risk of committing to a technology that nobody
else takes that seriously (hell, even the
http://lsid.sourceforge.net/ web site is
broken).
The references posted by Markus Döring were:
"Cool URIs for the Semantic Web" by Leo Sauermann DFKI
GmbH, Richard Cyganiak Freie Universität Berlin (D2R author), Max Völkel FZI
Karlsruhe
The authors of this document come from the semantic web
community and discuss what kind of URIs should be used for RDF resources.
This one here is written by the W3C and addresses the
questions "When should URNs or URIs with novel URI schemes be used to name
information resources for the Web?" The answers given are "Rarely if ever" and
"Probably not". Common arguments in favor of such novel naming schemas are
examined, and their properties compared with those of the existing http: URI
scheme.