Thanks, Arthur.

It has taken many years to bring the biological collection community this far (and still many institutions are reluctant to make their data available via GBIF) - to even propose that ALL their data be warehoused in mirror sites around the world would, I fear, cause many to withdraw even the data they are making available now. As desirable as I believe it is to make as much of these data freely available as possible, we have to be careful or we may lose much of which we have already gained. It is a political/social issue, and as such is a very difficult one to negotiate.

...which brings me back to my original post on this:

"...perhaps it would be useful for other shared data as well (geographic localities, people/agents, publications/references, etc.)..."

Most of the political/social issues revolve around specimen/observation records, and are less applicable to these "shared" data categories. I believe the "distributed warehouse" approach can also apply to specimen data (as I indicated in the original post), but maybe to help focus the current discussion -- and to re-orient it back to the GUID context -- we should concentrate discussions about such "distributed warehouses" to only globally shared datasets (taxonomy, geography, publications, people), where there is ambiguous "ownership" of the data objects (if not the myriad digital records representing those data objects).

Aloha, Rich