[tdwg-tag] LSID business model?

Dave Vieglais vieglais at ku.edu
Tue Apr 28 00:25:42 CEST 2009


I'm not sure if anyone has suggested this strategy (I'll be surprised  
if not):

TDWG seems determined to use LSIDs for GUIDs, yet the technical issues  
for implementation are discouraging enough for some to defer  
deployment.  Perhaps TDWG could offer as a bonus for membership (or  
perhaps a small additional charge) the provision of some elements of  
the LSID infrastructure stack, overloading the tdwg.org domain?

Then, instead of having each institution create DNS entries such as  
"mydepartment.institution.org" and deal with the SRV details, use TDWG  
as a kind of registrar and do something like  
"mycollectionid.tdwg.org".  TDWG would then be responsible for the  
appropriate DNS SRV registration, and could even operate a resolver  
and/or redirection service for that domain.

The income would not be very much (say $10/year per org * 100  
participants = $1k), but it should be a lot less expensive for the  
entire community than the total cost for each organization operating  
their own infrastructure (perhaps $10/year DNS + $1000/year operations  
* 100 participants = $101k).

So as not to overload the TDWG infrastructure, it would be sensible to  
encourage technically astute groups (e.g. GBIF, EoL, NCEAS) to  
contribute computing cycles and fallback DNS services to ensure  
reliability of the entire system.

The end result could be a reliable, distributed infrastructure for  
LSID (or whatever GUID scheme is decided upon) resolution that  
conforms to the requirements / specifications derived from the TDWG  
procedures at a small cost for participation.  The low cost and  
deferral of technical overhead to a knowledgeable group would  
hopefully encourage participation by a broader audience in this piece  
of fundamental architecture.

(It may also help reduce the endless cycles of discussion about GUIDs  
and LSIDs)

Dave V.



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