On 28 Jan 2006, at 01:02, Richard Pyle wrote:

The more I think about it, the more I think this is the sort of system that would work well for our field. A centralized issuer (which could issue blocks of thousands or millions of numbers at a time),

The major problem I see with this is that a central registry may be a rate limiting step because it has to allocate blocks, it would also decide for format of the last part of the identifier (which the provider might not find desirable), and it may well lead to lots of wasted identifiers (e.g., it allocates 100,000 to me, but I use 3 off them).

Would it not be better to devolve this? You can still have a central registry. For example, Handles and DOIs work by having a central registry for the prefix (e.g., "1018") and the provider is responsible for allocating the suffix locally.

I'm not sure how wise it would be to create a new syntax standard, rather than go with one of the ones we've discussed. But if (for example) using LSID, I personally think it would be preferable to establish a highly generic form, such as:

urn:lsid:gbif.org:BioGUID:12345

Without wishing to preempt some of the things I'm going to present at the workshop, I'm going off LSIDs a little because of their reliance on the Internet DNS. Apart from the hassle of mucking with the DNS records to set them up (I suspect not every provider is going to find this easy to do), it assumes that the Internet its present form is going to be here forever, and it also embeds information in the identifier (e.g., "gbif.org") that currently has meaning, but over time may loose meaning, or worse, be positively misleading (say if GBIF goes belly up and somebody else serves the data).

Handles (including DOIs) and ARK have no information in the identifier (perhaps not strictly true for some DOIs, but that's by choice not design), and also in principle don't need the internet. In the future some other mode of information transport may come along, and they could still be used.

While it might be hard to imagine the Internet and the DNS going away, if anybody has a 5 1/4" floppy lying around, they'll be aware of how hard it is to get information off it these days as 5 1/4" drives are scarce as hens teeth -- the only one in my department is in an old PC that is connected to the network. The digital library community seem particularly sensitive to these issues, which is perhaps why they use handles, DOIs, and ARK.

Regards

Rod

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