[tdwg-content] GUIDs on the semantic web [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED]

Paul Murray pmurray at anbg.gov.au
Mon May 9 04:21:45 CEST 2011


On 08/05/2011, at 6:12 AM, Steve   wrote:

> The second question is a little trickier.  The main purpose that I would want to use this for is to enable the use of GUIDs.  Using GUIDs rather than local IDs seems to be considered a better practice (or at least an allowed practice) in both the DwC term descriptions (e.g.

Not sure if this is relevant at all, but rfc 4122 (http://www.iana.org/go/rfc4122) defines a urn namespace for uuids (=guids).

If the problem is that guids "look like" local identifiers because they are not URIs, a correct way to convert a GUID into a URI is by prefixing it with "urn:uuid:" . Note that there is no resolution service or anything like that for these urns - it's just a semweb-compatible namespace.

(I think that it would be reasonable, for any LSID that just uses a guid as the objectid (and does not have a version component), to declare it to be owl:sameas the uuid urn. heck - same thing applies to linkedData http: URIs if a GUID alone potentially identifies the resource. After all - the whole point is that these things should not collide. Admittedly, it's a bit of a "solution looking for a problem". I'm not sure what the utility of doing this would be.)


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