[tdwg-guid] First step in implementing LSIDs

Roderic Page r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Thu Jun 7 08:53:35 CEST 2007


On 6 Jun 2007, at 22:50, Dave Vieglais wrote:

> Perhaps an adequate solution is to use LSIDs and provide definitive  
> guidelines indicating how they can be embedded in URLs so that we  
> do not loose interoperability with the rest of the world?  This is  
> probably much like Ricardo's LSID proxy proposal.  Except in my  
> opinion it should be extended further to be a general GUID resolver  
> to help resolve whatever form is used for GUIDs - then one could  
> embed a handle, LSID, HTTP URI, FTP URI, LDAP URI, or even, for the  
> ancients of the internet, z39.50 URIs in a resolver proxy URL and  
> get something back.  The problem of course is that the content that  
> comes back will be different for different protocols - but it  
> would, I suspect be possible to provide a generic form of metadata  
> for the different protocols.

This is pretty much what http://bioguid.info does with respect to  
DOIs, Handles, PubMed identifiers, and (some) specimens. I haven't  
added LSIDs to this, but have code to do so (as part of another  
project).

bioGUID returns RDF/XML for a GUID, displayed as HTML in a browser  
using an embedded style sheet ("view source" reveals the RDF). Any  
links to other GUIDs are rewritten as "bioGUIDs", that is, resolvable  
by http://bioguid.info. bioGUID supports 303 redirect to play nice  
with Semantic Web tools (most of which, it has to be said, suck).

Some examples are:

http://bioguid.info/doi:10.1109/mis.2006.62 [ DOI]
http://bioguid.info/casent:0008682-d03 [specimen]
http://bioguid.info/pmid:17213318 [PubMed]
http://bioguid.info/genbank:AY324464 [DNA sequence, with link to  
bioGUID for specimen and publication]

The original idea was to cache the RDF to speed up subsequent calls,  
and also to discover new links between GUIDs. This part stalled due  
to my trying to extract whatever I could from GenBank records, such  
as specimen links and DOIs if there is no PubMed record (see http:// 
bioguid.blogspot.com/2007/04/adding-guids-to-genbank-records.html for  
details). This led to work on reference parsing and OpenURL, but  
that's another story (http://ispiders.blogspot.com/2007/06/gimme-that- 
scientific-paper.html).

Hence, my own response to this thread would be to add LSID support to  
bioGUID, and continue to play with linking all these GUIDs together.

Regards

Rod



----------------------------------------
Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
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