I agree with Kevin that the Foreign Authentication Notification services looked like an interesting way of providing third party data. I didn't go into it in too much detail, but from what I discussed with Ben, it might well work quite well as a way of providing linkouts from name information to other information linked via that name (e.g. a taxon concept ...)

Unfortunately I'm unlikely to have any time to investigate this further in time for the June meeting. My idea was that anyone who had interesting information that was keyed by an IPNI LSID (such as a concept) could notify us of that fact using FAN and we could then provide an automated link out from the relevant IPNI record to those related records. The original idea was to do this so we could provide relevant drill downs from the website, but it could also be included as part of the LSID metadata. We'd have to have some sort of authentication method to stop link spammers.

Anyway that's as far as I had got with the idea, if anyone wants to take up the question further ...

Sally

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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*** Sally Hinchcliffe *** Computer section, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew *** tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5708 *** S.Hinchcliffe@rbgkew.org.uk