[tdwg-guid] First step in implementing LSIDs

Donat Agosti agosti at amnh.org
Thu Jun 7 09:31:20 CEST 2007


Dear colleagues and Jonathan

Below a email from Jonathan Rees at the Science Commons, an institution with
a great interest and experience in identifiers. Since systematics ought be
lnked to the greated science, it seems all to obvious to get SC involved. It
would be interesting to get something like their Neurocommons up and running
to show the potential of having all these identifiers and other standards in
place (http://sciencecommons.org/projects/data/)

Obivously, there is on interest in bioinformatics, and it might also be a
way to sync other with other large projects like EOL.

Furthermore, I would also like to point out to the forthcoming OASIS
(http://www.oasis-open.org/home/index.php) / Creative Commons meeting
(http://conservationcommons.org/)(June 26,.Arlington), where the
conservationists talk to OASIS to develop standards allowing exchanging of
conservation information, and I hope also linking our taxonomic data with
their work. Contact for that is Silvio Olivieri and Tom Hammond, and Lee
Belbin is involved.

Donat

 



-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Rees [mailto:jar at creativecommons.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2007 8:32 PM
To: Donat Agosti
Cc: John Wilbanks
Subject: Re: [Fwd: LSID discussion - a practical suggestion?]

Donat,

John Wilbanks forwarded your email to me.

I spent a while recently trying to understand LSID's. I concluded  
that they don't work very well, and that their shortcomings help  
explain why they've become pretty much obsolete. The W3C web  
architecture recommendations are a much better way to go.

A lot of the identifier-angst in the thread that John forwarded is  
resolved if you buy the semantic web religion: each identifier (URI)  
denotes something; you have to say somehow what that thing is; and  
puns are not allowed.  So the metadata record, if it has an  
identifier at all (and it probably should, for provenance purposes),  
gets a different identifier from the data that it describes, etc.

Regarding identifiers, please check out:

http://sw.neurocommons.org/2007/uri-explanation.html
http://wiki.neurocommons.org/CommonNaming
http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~sauermann/2006/11/cooluris/
http://sw.neurocommons.org/2007/kb.html

I will be reporting to the W3C Semantic Web Health Care and Life  
Sciences interest group next week on this subject. Would be happy to  
talk with you as much as you like about it.

I'm planning to attempt contact with Jim Hendler, who I understand is  
a technical advisor to EOL, to see whether I can offer to help with  
EOL architecture as it relates to the semantic web. What these days  
is called "biodiversity informatics" is squarely in Science Commons's  
domain of interest and I would be delighted to get connected with  
groups discussing it.

Best
Jonathan Rees






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