[tdwg-tag] LSID Sourceforge URL & LSID Best Practices

[Jim Croft]

1. Building mission-critical stuff around a single point of failure
without distributed replicated redundancy is amateurish, ultimately
doomed to failure, and I am amazed that everybody does it.   The drive
for an easy solution with smart response times wins every time.  IMO,
the Australia's Virtual Herbarium took a step backward when it moved
from a distributed to a cached solution without building in fail-over
redundancy.  Yes, the new version is quicker but when it does not work
you are clean out of luck.  If we are going to build anything that is
going to become mission-critical and expect people to use it, then I
want more than one of them.

2. is an admirable aspiration and it is starting to look like a
project or service home in the US is not a good idea until they relax
these absurd regional access policies for public good science,
environment and cultural endeavours.  Intercontinental replication
could fix this.  It would not, as you point out, address individual
country's domestic access policies. But hey, that is not TDWG's
problem.

3. TDWG internal and external contradiction is pretty much ubiquitous
and it has always been thus.  Achieving integrity between projects and
standards is perhaps one of TDWG's biggest challenges.  There is
probably not a lot new that has to be invented, but there is a
mountain that has to be pulled together. I am looking at you, rdfy
vocabulary ontology thingy... ;)

4. Probably.  If they were considered at all.

5. Greg Whitbread's pun's are indeed atrocious and there is absolutely
nothing we have been able to do about them.  On behalf of a nation, I
apologize... :)

jim

On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Roderic Page<r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
> OK, the message I'm getting is that:
>
> 1. It's perfectly acceptable for the public face of a major
> biodiversity informatics project to be broken in a way that makes us
> look amateurish.
>
> 2. TDWG must guarantee universal analysis at all times (even thought
> China may, on a whim, ban access to any site it choses).
>
> 3. That TDWG is already using Google Code for Darwin Core (http://code.google.com/p/darwincore/
>  ) is, of course, irrelevant to this discussion, as is the fact that
> Google Code seems fine for GBIF (http://code.google.com/p/gbif-ecat/ )
> and EOL (http://code.google.com/p/eol-website/ ) projects.
>
> 4. Nobody thought these issues were important when the original
> project was set up on SourceForge  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SourceForge
>  ).
>
> 5. That Greg Whitbread's puns are appalling.
>
> I'm clearly too worked up about this, but all I'm looking for is a
> simple fix to a simple problem. Instead, we're off on some tangent
> about incorporation, instead of actually dealing with the issue at
> hand. Perhaps I shouldn't get too bothered, and take this discussion
> as tacit agreement that LSIDs are doomed anyway.
>
> Regards
>
> Rod
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Roderic Page
> Professor of Taxonomy
> DEEB, FBLS
> Graham Kerr Building
> University of Glasgow
> Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
>
> Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
> Tel: +44 141 330 4778
> Fax: +44 141 330 2792
> AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
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> Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html
>
>
>
>
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>
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-- 
_________________
Jim Croft ~ jim.croft at gmail.com ~ +61-2-62509499 ~
http://www.google.com/profiles/jim.croft
... in pursuit of the meaning of leaf ...
... 'All is leaf' ('Alles ist Blatt') - Goethe