Sorry if I send comments to the various mails and if some points were further discussed later, but coming back from meetings I have some time now to go through the many postings of this last days.

Pat

Roderic Page r.page@BIO.GLA.AC.UK wrote:

I'm a bit concerned that some may have conflated "Global" with "Centralised". GUIDs do not need to be centrally issued, indeed I'd argue that this is counter productive. To my mind the lesson from the web is decentralisation is the only way to cope with the issue of scale. Attempts at grandiose centralisation tend to fail. Hence, we should plan for GUIDs to be issued by more than one data source. After all, we are talking about GUIDs for digital objects, not ideas.

I agree here with Rod that for the GUID decentralisation is a better solution, that a "grandiose centralisation option" will tend to fail in this case, not only for technical but also for "social" reasons.

The idea that only the resolution system needs to be able to distinguish between specimens, taxon names, etc., seems unfortunate. With LSIDs the GUID has a namespace element, which can be readily used to distinguish between types of record (e.g., a PubMed record and a DNA sequence record from NCBI have different namespaces).

Assigning GUIDs solely to basionyms strikes me as crazy -- I'd suggest most taxa aren't known by their basionyms. I'd advocate GUIDs for every name string (with the possible exception of orthographic variants, spelling mistakes, etc.). I don't really think this is about taxonomy, it's about information retrieval and stability of identifiers for digital objects.

Here also I tend to agree, what we need is a technical GUID that enable to identify what is out there, the compliance with nomenclatural, taxonomical rules has to and is already dealt with elsewhere I believe ?

Lastly, "imposing standards" is the wrong way to think about this. Standards win support if they work, and are adopted. I'd suggest this stuff will happen if people make compelling applications that others make use of, not because TDWG decides what should be done.

So, my final question is, what is wrong with having each taxonomic database serve their own GUIDs for their own data (using an agreed format, such as RDF), and where possible GUIDs from different sources are mapped (e.g., a name string in IPNI to one in uBio). Users employ whatever GUID they find useful -- at least we then know what digital object they are referring to.

If we think of the scientific literature, many paper have at least two GUIDs (DOI and PubMed), both of which are useful, and which serve different purposes.

This may seem like a recipe for anarchy, but we can do this now (and, in effect we already have, my Taxonomic Search Engine serves LSIDs for the major taxonomic name databases). If we think the solution rests with a central authority (and ZooBank) then I think we are fooling ourselves.

Regards

Rod

------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------------- Professor Roderic D. M. Page Editor, Systematic Biology DEEB, IBLS Graham Kerr Building University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QP United Kingdom

Phone: +44 141 330 4778 Fax: +44 141 330 2792 email: r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk web: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html

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