I started this note based on Rod Page's Blog thoughts on Wiki Modeling, which got me thinking. http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2009/02/wiki-modelling-part-1.html Also, if you go back to the 2006 tdwg list I tried to make this point earlier, but did not seem to succeed and that is why I ended up creating my own species concept identifiers. The NCBI taxon id works in a way similar to the GeoSpecies ID's in that the ID stays the same despite changes in nomenclature. I would use this except that there is no NCBI ID for most species. There needs to be a sequence for there to be an NCBI ID. In this sense, the NCBI ID and GeoSpecies ID are compatible types of OTU's. It seems that the genomics/proteomics people are already using forms of the NCBI ID as Species identifiers (URI's) For example, these are similar concepts, in that the meaning is similar and they stay the same despite changes in nomenclature. They are being used as Species Concept identifiers. http://species.geospecies.org/spec_concept_uuid/0fcb5b7e-bcfc-4b56-b565-e1e3... http://bio2rdf.org/taxon:7163 http://purl.uniprot.org/taxonomy/7163 These are names or taxonomic hypothesis: http://lsid.tdwg.org/urn:lsid:ubio.org:namebank:2593981 <- name Aedes vexans , taxonomic hierarchy (hypothesis), changes with changes in nomenclature http://lsid.tdwg.org/urn:lsid:ubio.org:classificationbank:11149341 <- taxonomic hierarchy (hypothesis) http://lsid.tdwg.org/urn:lsid:ubio.org:classificationbank:2463176 <- taxonomic hierarchy (hypothesis) This gets into what makes a good species concept URI. (identifier) The first set of identifiers can represent a Species Concept independent of a particular taxonomic hypothesis The second set of identifiers represent various taxonomic hypotheses, that might apply to a specific species concept. Was I able to clearly demonstrate the differences between these two type of identifiers? Under this model, the species hypothesis i.e. name is not the Species Concept. Comments, suggestions and disagreements are welcome :-) - Pete --------------------------------------------------------------- Pete DeVries Department of Entomology University of Wisconsin - Madison 445 Russell Laboratories 1630 Linden Drive Madison, WI 53706 ------------------------------------------------------------