Pete

 

I think that a good portion of your comments and questions here will be taking TDWGers and TAXACOMers back to old and very thrashed out arguments.  but it is always good to recap.

 

I think you will find the TAG and GUID subgroups of TDWG very interesting.  Over the past 5 years or so, it has been a well recognised fact that GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers - UUIDs, URIs etc), are a key component to working with global data, integration and reuse of those data.  This is explained on the TAG wiki site (http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/WebHome), where one of the main points is the 3 legs of a stool that provide a foundation to a good  architecture - GUIDs, Protocols and Ontologies. 

 

One of the results of these working groups has been the investigation and adoption of a particular GUID type called LSID (Life Science Identifiers).  One of the driving reasons for preference for LSIDs is the fact that they have a degree of separation from "hard coded" URLs, which can all too easily be broken.  The recommended metadata format for responses of resolving LSIDs is RDF.  And as this has shown itself to be a more elegant approach to modeling data and data standards, RDF has been adopted to some degree as the modeling format for some of the TDWG standards.  The major data components of interest to TDWG, including taxon names, have been developed into RDF ontologies and can be seen at http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki/bin/view/TAG/LsidVocs.  So this will be of interest to you.

 

I think you are touching on two very different areas of discussion below - one of them is really "what is a species and how do we attach GUIDs to them?", and I think you are covering fairly well in your other thread.  The other area, and probably the easier area to discuss, is purely what GUID and data representation technologies to use for delivering the data we are interested in, and how to handle changes to that data.  Being from an IT background I always view this problem from a data perspective and tend to think of a database record being the object being identified - if you change the database record, and people were relying on the essential details of that record, then we could easily end up with invalidated data - I therefore suggest if any essential part of a data record is being modified, that the record get a new GUID (and with my limited understanding of taxonomic intricacies, I would really think that if you are changing the "concept"/understanding/meaning of a species record, then it should be given a new GUID.

 

So I think the answer to your question must be yes, we do have quite an interest in the topics you covered.

 

I hope this helps.

 

Kevin

 

 

PS I attempted to view your talk using the link you gave and I was not sure what to do next to see the talk itself.  I attempted to browse to "Recorded Presentation", but I needed a login, which I do not have???

 

 

 

I don't know how many of you are working with Semantic Web technologies, but I did a talk at the