A colleague spotted this news item in Bio-IT World (http://www.bio-itworld.com/newsitems/2005/oct2005/10-27-05-news-i3c? page=1) about I3C (the Interoperable Informatics Infrastructure Consortium) folding.

I3C were instrumental in getting LSIDs of the ground. This might seem to bode poorly for LSIDs, but I think it's clear that the future of LSIDs is distinct from that of I3C -- the source code is available, and LSIDs are being used.

For me the interesting point made by the article is that the goals of I3C overlap with the Semantic Web community, and hence the pressing need for I3C began to fade. My sense is that much of what we want to achieve can be done on the back of work being done by the Semantic Web community -- indeed my own work on taxonomic and phylogenetic databases is heavily influenced by these ideas. As the Bio-IT World article points out, a key step towards using Semantic Web technologies is the use of globally unique identifiers, i.e., LSIDs.

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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