[tdwg-content] Idea for Discussion, Differentiating between "type's" of identifiers

[Hilmar Lapp]

On Oct 6, 2010, at 4:18 AM, Markus Döring wrote:

> Dwc has the goal of being technology independent

I think this is worth stressing, and a Good Thing(tm). Adding  
technology-specific fields to DwC with the sole goal of making it more  
suitable for a particular technology is a recipe for mess and thus non- 
compliance, rather than clarity and simplicity.

> And even within those there might be various ways of using them  
> (e.g. we have a normalised and a simple flat xml schema), thats why  
> we should have a guideline for each of them on how to use them. We  
> are missing such a guideline for rdf currently, hence this debate.

I agree. I don't really see why this is so different from DC. There is  
no dcterms:identifierDOI or dcterms:identifierISSN or  
dcterms:identifierISBN either. Instead, there is a documented social  
convention on what to put into the dcterms:identifier field. That  
still leaves ample room for not following that convention, but it does  
keep the standard clear, and gives consumers one element to inspect  
when they want an identifier.

I would rather have a simple and clear standard with documented social  
conventions, and a blessed validator tool that tells providers whether  
they are following the conventions or not.

> With the introduction if many ID terms we have diluted that idea a  
> little already in my mind.
> We could have as well used scientificName in xml to hold some  
> identifier for that name.

I actually do think that there is a difference between a name (usually  
a label) and an identifier.

	-hilmar
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: Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
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