Relying on crwalers is not always going to get all the relevant information for a particular query, especially if that relevant data that is hidden deep inside some organisation's database, and hence cannot be found via crawlers. To get the best functionality for the system I think we need to strongly reccommend a required set of services that all of our data providers need to provide (ie including the LSID FAN services that allow thrid party 'annotations' of LSID objects). For those who cannot provide all services, then tools like crawlers could attempt to fill the gap. Kevin

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dhobern@GBIF.ORG 21/04/2006 9:15 p.m. >>>

There would seem to be two other fairly obvious approaches we could follow to manage external annotation of LSIDs: We could rely simply on passive discovery of the links by crawler applications such as the GBIF data indexer * when indexing the third-party data, it would be possible to store a reference to the relationship between the objects and to offer a service allowing users to check for "additional information" on any LSID. This relies on good coverage by the crawler tools * in particular it assumes that the data objects offered by the third-party data provider belong to classes which are themselves of interest to the crawler.

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