Dear colleagues and Jonathan

Below a email from Jonathan Rees at the Science Commons, an institution with a great interest and experience in identifiers. Since systematics ought be lnked to the greated science, it seems all to obvious to get SC involved. It would be interesting to get something like their Neurocommons up and running to show the potential of having all these identifiers and other standards in place (http://sciencecommons.org/projects/data/)

Obivously, there is on interest in bioinformatics, and it might also be a way to sync other with other large projects like EOL.

Furthermore, I would also like to point out to the forthcoming OASIS (http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php) / Creative Commons meeting (http://conservationcommons.org/)(June 26,.Arlington), where the conservationists talk to OASIS to develop standards allowing exchanging of conservation information, and I hope also linking our taxonomic data with their work. Contact for that is Silvio Olivieri and Tom Hammond, and Lee Belbin is involved.

Donat

-----Original Message----- From: Jonathan Rees [mailto:jar@creativecommons.org] Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2007 8:32 PM To: Donat Agosti Cc: John Wilbanks Subject: Re: [Fwd: LSID discussion - a practical suggestion?]

Donat,

John Wilbanks forwarded your email to me.

I spent a while recently trying to understand LSID's. I concluded that they don't work very well, and that their shortcomings help explain why they've become pretty much obsolete. The W3C web architecture recommendations are a much better way to go.

A lot of the identifier-angst in the thread that John forwarded is resolved if you buy the semantic web religion: each identifier (URI) denotes something; you have to say somehow what that thing is; and puns are not allowed. So the metadata record, if it has an identifier at all (and it probably should, for provenance purposes), gets a different identifier from the data that it describes, etc.

Regarding identifiers, please check out:

http://sw.neurocommons.org/2007/uri-explanation.html http://wiki.neurocommons.org/CommonNaming http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/2006/11/cooluris/ http://sw.neurocommons.org/2007/kb.html

I will be reporting to the W3C Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences interest group next week on this subject. Would be happy to talk with you as much as you like about it.

I'm planning to attempt contact with Jim Hendler, who I understand is a technical advisor to EOL, to see whether I can offer to help with EOL architecture as it relates to the semantic web. What these days is called "biodiversity informatics" is squarely in Science Commons's domain of interest and I would be delighted to get connected with groups discussing it.

Best Jonathan Rees