Topic 3: GUIDs for Taxon Names and Taxon Concepts

[Roderic Page]

Luckily, the "Wayback Machine" at the Internet Archive
(http://web.archive.org) has a copy, which you can get here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20010215174320/http://
www.environment.gov.au/marine/manuals_reports/standards/general/
chapman.html .

I found this page by Googling on the title of the essay, finding what
looked like the broken link you mentioned, then putting the link into
the Wayback machine.

This nicely illustrates the issue of digital curation, which I think
this community will need to think seriously about.

Regards

Rod

On 12 Dec 2005, at 21:59, Arthur Chapman wrote:

> I agree with Rod here
>
> If we try and build IP rights into a GUID we will get absolutely no
> where.  GUIDs are meant to be machine to machine and aren't meant to
> be human readable or human intelligent.  There are better ways to
> handle IP /Access constraints/ Conditions of Use, etc. through
> Metadata (at both the Dataset level and record level if necessary),
> but these shouldn't be handles through GUIDs.
>
> The use of Creative Commons is not inconsistent with Dublin Core, it
> is not necessarily one or the other - Creative Commons can fit neatly
> inside Dublin Core.
>
> About 10 years ago I wrote a paper on "Intellectual Property Rights in
> a Digital World" that covered some of these issues.  Unfortunately, it
> was electronic and the Government Department that owned the web site
> later decided it was not important and deleted it in a revamp of the
> Web site!  If anyone still has a copy, could they please send it to
> me, as I no longer have a copy myself.  If I can get a copy, I will
> make it available as I believe it is still relevant.
>
> Arthur Chapman
>
>> From Roderic Page <r.page at BIO.GLA.AC.UK> on 12 Dec 2005:
>
>> A quick comment:
>>
>>>
>>> 6. Would there be any social or technical roadblocks to replacing
>>> these identifiers with a single identifier that was guaranteed to be
>>> unique?
>>>
>>> Yes. We are the creators and maintainers of both nomenclatural and
>>> taxonomic data. We would be unhappy about any resolution mechanism
>>> that didn't acknowldge our IP in that process. For example, if the
>>> LSID contained another organisation's namespace when we were the
>>> originators/editors of that entity.
>>
>> Leaving aside the awful term "Intellectual Property" -- which should
>> be
>>>
>> avoided like the plague (see
>> http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.xhtml ) -- this strikes me as an
>> issue handled by metadata, not the GUID itself. For example, there are
>> vocabularies such as Dublin Core (http://www.dublincore.org/), or even
>> better, Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/) which can
>> handle
>>>
>> these issues. I'd strongly favour the later, as Creative Commons
>> licenses are designed to be computer-readable, and hence can be
>> handled
>>>
>> automatically. If a license has to be read by a human, we're shooting
>> ourselves in the foot.
>>
>> I understand that people want credit for their hard work, but this
>> shouldn't get in the way of a workable system. Imagine if everybody
>> submitting a sequence to GenBank insisted on their organisation's
>> namespace being in the GenBank accession number! It would be a utter
>> mess. In the same way, with DOIs even the mighty Elsevier don't mind
>> that the DOI has nothing that (explicitly) identifies them as the
>> source.
>>
>> Please let us not let "Intellectual Property" get in the way of a
>> sensible solution. To my mind "IP" is one of the biggest obstacles in
>> the way of biodiversity informatics achieving its potential.
>>
>> Regards
>>
>> Rod
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> -->
>> ----------------------------------------
>> Professor Roderic D. M. Page
>> Editor, Systematic Biology
>> DEEB, IBLS
>> Graham Kerr Building
>> University of Glasgow
>> Glasgow G12 8QP
>> United Kingdom
>>
>> Phone:    +44 141 330 4778
>> Fax:      +44 141 330 2792
>> email:    r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
>> web:      http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
>> reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html
>>
>> Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic
>> Biologists Website:  http://systematicbiology.org
>> Search for taxon names at
>> http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/
>> Find out what we know about a species at http://ispecies.org
>>
>
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------
Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom

Phone:    +44 141 330 4778
Fax:      +44 141 330 2792
email:    r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
web:      http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
reprints: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/pubs.html

Subscribe to Systematic Biology through the Society of Systematic
Biologists Website:  http://systematicbiology.org
Search for taxon names at http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/portal/
Find out what we know about a species at http://ispecies.org




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