Greetings GUIDers,
We are in the process of adding new functionality to our biodiversity database application that would include adding LSID "compliance" to our existing database of botanical collections. I have some questions about how the rest of the community is addressing some particular issues.
I've read through the TDWG GUID Wiki and there seems to be some debate about how LSIDs should be applied to various entities in a system. I like the ideas I've read about "conceptual entities" and "hubs" because this lines up well with many of our ideas of how LSIDs could work for us. We do have a lot of images but right now our primary concern is with the collection metadata, so for the sake of this email, I'm going to exclude any questions about image or other bytecode. We will not be implementing an LSID resolver immediately, but we do want to make sure our schema and implementation of LSIDs will allow us a easy and seamless transition to having a proper resolver.
At this stage, we are only concerned with assigning LSIDs to collections/collection events, specimens and versions of each. Since these aren't represented by bytecode we don't have to be concerned about issuing a new LSID each time the metadata changes (through improvements/changes in determination, geolocation etc), but we also don't want to throw away the previous revisions so the concept of a "hub" would serve well. This hub would allow us to have a single unchanging LSID that points to (or returns) the current metadata but also points to each LSID for the previous collection revisions. A change in the collection metadata would not change the LSID of the collection hub, it would just create a new collection version record which is issued a new LSID and promoted to "current". This collection hub would also point to a "hub" for each of the specimens that are represented by the collection and these specimen hubs would each point to the current metadata for the specimen as well as the previous versions. We would not be using the revision method of LSIDs, rather we would issue a totally new LSID for each version as recommended by TDWG.
So the big questions are, 1) does this sound in line with the spec and 2) does this method of issuing LSIDs for "hubs" and revisions fit in with the approach others are taking? Any suggestions or caveats are appreciated.
Thanks, Jason
Jason Best IT Manager - Andes to Amazon Biodiversity Program Botanical Research Institute of Texas atrium.andesamazon.org