[tdwg-guid] Immutability of LSID data

Richard Pyle deepreef at bishopmuseum.org
Tue Jul 17 03:17:27 CEST 2007


Hi Bryan,

> What is data and what is metadata has no relation to being 
> digital or not. There was data and metadata long before there 
> were computers.  

Again, we are coming back to this communication problem.  I agree with you
in the context of the words "data" and "metadata" as most of us probably
define them.  But we are talking about LSIDs, and so we should follow the
definitions of these words in the context of the LSID spec.  It may be
terribly unfortunate that the LSID spec defines "data" differently from how
most of us would use that word -- just as it is terribly unfortunate that a
"named concept" has essentially nothing to do with either a taxon "concept"
or a taxon "name", or that a "Class" written in C++ has no relationship to
the "Class" Mammalia, or that a data "type" has nothing to do with a "type"
specimen, or the fact that all of these "homonyms" cause problems that are
different from the sorts of problems created by taxonomic "homonyms" --
among dozens of other frustrating language barriers we have.

However, in the context of LSIDs, which is what we are now discussing, the
word "data" does indeed unambiguously refer to a digital/binary bytestream,
and *not* the kind of "data" that Galileo collected.

Aloha,
Rich





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