Hi all

I have been thinking about the LSID resolvers that have been set up within the TDWG community so far. Some of these resolvers have evolved from the prototype/experimental stage of the GUID and TAG subgroups.

There are also a variety of resolvers that no longer seem to be up and running, eg LSIDs at http://lsid.biopathways.org/authorities.shtml Most of the example LSIDs at Rod Page's tester page fail to some degree - http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/lsid/tester/

Also, different metadata is being returned for each resolver.

I have had comments that these LSID resolvers are not working, and "isn't the intention of LSIDs for them to persist forever and always be available".

I wonder if one of our goals for the next year should be to look at these existing resolvers and decide on / announce / commit to their continued existence, metadata formats, etc.

I think the following probably need to be addressed: - decide if each resolver is experimental or permanent - perhaps we need some standard "metadata" about a resolver that describes the intention of that resolver (eg whether it is experimental or not) - decide if the resolver should be taken offline to avoid confusion - the metadata format for similar resolvers, eg resolvers dealing with Taxon Name objetcs, or Taxon Concepts, or Specimens, etc. Does this need to be the same for each resolver? always RDF? In some cases a single class of the LSID vocabularies have been implemented, in other cases a mixture of several classes and properties. Do wee need some guidelines, best practices for the "reccommended" fields? This obviously requires further work with associated ontologies.

Any thoughts?

Kevin