[tdwg-guid] TDWG LSID Resolver broken?

[Roderic Page]

Dear Rich,

I'm not quit sure I understand "flattened". If you are asking whether  
the entire citation should be written as one string, e.g.

Baldwin, C. C. and W. L. Smith (1998). Belonoperca pylei , a new  
species of seabass (Teleostei: Serranidae: Epinephelinae:  
Diploprionini) from the cook islands with comments on relationships  
among diploprionins. Ichthyological Research 45(4):325-339.

such as would be included in a Dublin Core tag  
dcterms:bibliographicCitation then I think this would be a BAD THING.  
By all means have this as an additional element, but keep the  
individual bibliographic elements (volume, issue, pagination, etc)  
separate. This greatly simplifies the task of anybody trying to find  
the reference, or assign a GUID.

If by flat you mean that the journal information is a link to another  
LSID for the journal, rather than containing a string for the journal  
name, to me it seems needlessly complex not to include the journal  
name in the RDF that has the rest of the bibliographic information  
(that is, as well as any link to the journal). The ISSN is already  
included, which applies to the journal not the article, so if the  
idea was to cleanly separate articles from containing journals, then  
the model has already failed to do that.

Lastly, I'm sure I missed the discussion, but I don't see why the RDF  
at http://rs.tdwg.org/ontology/voc/PublicationCitation has it's own  
vocabulary, rather than using existing vocabularies such as Dublin  
Core (see http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-citation-guidelines/)  
and PRISM. Another aspect of integration is sharing vocabulary as  
well as GUIDs.

Compare

http://nsdb.bishopmuseum.org/authority/metadata/? 
lsid=urn:lsid:bishopmuseum.org:tnu:20889795-7EC7-42F3-A4C3-D1D97704A609

with

http://www.connotea.org/rss/uri/876ae25827e2e94426845b277686efca

Wonder which one is more likely to be integrated into other  
databases...?

Regards

Rod


On 29 Nov 2007, at 20:45, Richard Pyle wrote:

>
> Hi Rod,
>
>> If, however, there's no GUID then I would want all the
>> relevant metadata to hand to be able to try and find one, I
>> don't want to have to go up citation tree to get the journal
>> name, I just want to take the bibliographic metadata in the
>> RDF for the name and search for the GUID (e.g., using an
>> OpenURL resolver).
>
> Right -- and I agree.  But my question was whether the citation  
> tree should
> merely be "flattened" ("collapsed"?) into a single text string that is
> instered into "parentCitationString", or should there be some sort  
> of nested
> structure to accommodate each level in the tree.  My gut feeling --  
> at least
> for now (and for simplicity), is to collapse it into a single text  
> value.
>
>> You get to sleep -- luxury! ;-)
>
> :-)
>
> Actually, I have to confess:  I had 11 hours of sleep last night.  
> After a
> marathon week, I often just collapse on the sofa when I get home,  
> and don't
> open my eyes again until the next morning.
>
>> Personally I would strip out any formatting, especially from
>> a field that will be interpreted by other software.
>> Furthermore, what would you do if the metadata gets served in
>> another format, such as n3, or JSON, etc.?
>
> I tend to agree -- but I wanted to get a sense for what others were  
> doing.
>
> Aloha,
> Rich
>
>
>

----------------------------------------
Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QP
United Kingdom

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