A quick comment:

6. Would there be any social or technical roadblocks to replacing these identifiers with a single identifier that was guaranteed to be unique?   Yes. We are the creators and maintainers of both nomenclatural and taxonomic data. We would be unhappy about any resolution mechanism that didn't acknowldge our IP in that process. For example, if the LSID contained another organisation's namespace when we were the originators/editors of that entity.

Leaving aside the awful term "Intellectual Property" -- which should be avoided like the plague (see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml ) -- this strikes me as an issue handled by metadata, not the GUID itself. For example, there are vocabularies such as Dublin Core (http://www.dublincore.org/), or even better, Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) which can handle these issues. I'd strongly favour the later, as Creative Commons licenses are designed to be computer-readable, and hence can be handled automatically. If a license has to be read by a human, we're shooting ourselves in the foot.

I understand that people want credit for their hard work, but this shouldn't get in the way of a workable system. Imagine if everybody submitting a sequence to GenBank insisted on their organisation's namespace being in the GenBank accession number! It would be a utter mess. In the same way, with DOIs even the mighty Elsevier don't mind that the DOI has nothing that (explicitly) identifies them as the source.

Please let us not let "Intellectual Property" get in the way of a sensible solution. To my mind "IP" is one of the biggest obstacles in the way of biodiversity informatics achieving its potential.

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

Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic Biologists Website: http://systematicbiology.org Search for taxon names at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/ Find out what we know about a species at http://ispecies.org