Folks,

As you probably know, some of us will be getting together in a couple of weeks to discuss the use of Globally Unique Identifiers in our community, at the GUID-1 Workshop in Durham, USA. One of the topics we will discuss during the workshop is the adoption of an existing GUID technology.

Joining us at the meeting we will have specialists in some of the GUID technologies under consideration. In particular, we will meet at the workshop:

- Ben Szekely, who is a Software Engineer at IBM. Ben is one of the creators of the Life Sciences Identifiers (LSID) specification and one of the main developers of a LSID reference implementation in Java; and - George Garrity, who is a Professor at the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University. Professor Garrity is leading the Names4Life project, a member of the International DOI Foundation which is planning to assign digital object identifiers (DOIs) to semantically meaningful nodes in a nomenclature system.

Both Ben Szekely and George Garrity kindly accepted our invitation to give a short 30-minute talk each on the Life Sciences Identifiers (LSID) and Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), respectively, on the first day of our workshop (see the agenda: http://wiki.gbif.org/guidwiki/wikka.php?wakka=GUID1Agenda).

So, if you have specific questions regarding either technology, please take advantage of this opportunity and ask your question to the list, or directly to me. We will do whatever we can to address the questions and maybe even address it in their presentations (if time allows).

Please ask your questions even if you are not going to attend to the workshop, so you make sure the participants address the concerns you may have. The results will appear on the minutes of the workshop, to be published on our wiki shortly after it ends.

Cheers,

Ricardo