[tdwg-content] delimiter characters for concatenated IDs

[Hilmar Lapp]

On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk> wrote:

> Contrary to Hilmar, there is more to this than simply a quick hackathon.
> Yes, a service that takes metadata and returns one or more identifiers is a
> good idea and easy to create (there will often be more than one because
> museum codes are not unique). But who maintains this service? Who maintains
> the identifiers? Who do I complain to if they break? How do we ensure that
> they persist when, say, a museum closes down, moves its collection, changes
> it’s web technology? Who provides the tools that add value to the
> identifiers? (there’s no point having them if they are not useful)
>

Jonathan Rees pointed this out to me too off-list. Just for the record,
this isn't contrary but fully in line with what I was saying (or trying to
say). Yes, I didn't elaborate that part, assuming, perhaps rather
erroneously, that all this goes without saying, but I did mention that one
part of this becoming a real solution has to be an institution with an
in-scope cyberinfrastructure mandate that going in would make a commitment
to sustain the resolver, including working with partners on the above slew
of questions. The institution I gave was iDigBio; perhaps for some reason
that would not be a good choice, but whether they are or not wasn't my
point.

I will add one point to this, though. It seems to me that by continuing to
argue that we can't go ahead with building a resolver that works (as far as
technical requirements are concerned) before we haven't first fully
addressed the institutional and social long-term sustainability commitment
problem, we are and have been making this one big hairy problem that we
can't make any practical pragmatic headway about, rather than breaking it
down into parts, some of which (namely the primarily technical ones) are
actually fairly straightforward to solve. As a result, to this day we don't
have some solution that even though it's not very sustainable yet, at least
proves to everyone how critical it is, and that the community can rally
behind. Perhaps that's naïve, but I do think that once there's a solution
the community rallies behind, ways to sustain it will be found.

  -hilmar
-- 
Hilmar Lapp -:- informatics.nescent.org/wiki -:- lappland.io
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