Hi there. I've been lurking here for a while - since Mark mentioned
me I guess its time to throw in a few more cents into this already
overflowing pot.
What I meant to suggest to him was that someone really needs to write
a reasonably simple ~client (not server...) program that would let
people follow their nose programmatically to LSID resolution. I
managed to get the Java client code from IBM (http://tinyurl.com/
2hvjf6 ) running this morning, but a) it was a pain and b) of the few
lsids I had on hand, only one of them worked.
urn:lsid:biomoby.org:objectclass:DNASequence:2001-09-21T16-00-00Z
I'm pretty new (and hesitant to join) the standards wars, but I think
there is really a lot of power in the "he who codes first [and best]"
wins" argument. For those of you arguing for the adoption of LSIDs,
IMHO, the most powerful thing you could really do at this point would
be to step up and take over the development of the (as far as I can
tell) abandoned code stack at the often-discussed sourceforge site.
Given their experience using lsids, the BioMoby team (sorry Ed..) is
really the most likely candidate to do this effectively.
Philosophical and futurist arguments aside, the technical weight of
the enormous amount of code and number of people that already
understand URLs and (do not understand URNs), seems to be winning the
argument all by itself.
-Ben
On Jul 12, 2007, at 8:20 AM, Mark Wilkinson wrote:
I suspect that the firefox plugin, like the resolver client that we
have implemented here
http://mobycentral.icapture.ubc.ca:8090/authority/data/
LSID_resolver.jsp
both resolve LSIDs the way they are supposed to: By discovery of
the appropriate resolver using the discovery methodology defined by
the LSID spec.
In the easiest case, all the information you need to discover a
resolver is in the LSID itself. In the worst case, it is somewhere
in the DNS system, but discoverable using the LSID itself... so
there's really nothing to worry about. There's no "centralization"
happening in LSIDs.
Ben Good suggested to me yesterday that I should put up a blog of
"LSIDs in 10 minutes" showing the code required to implement an
authority server and a resolver server. ...I wish I didn't have
four grants due in two weeks!!
M
On Thu, 12 Jul 2007 06:20:00 -0700, Jonathan Rees
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
When I asked for a HOWTO I meant something a bit more general and
protocol oriented. Surely you're not advising that a new semweb
application should link against Firefox, or that it should have a
particular LSID resolver address wired in. As Mark W has pointed out,
a single point of failure and contention is not a good thing.
How does the Firefox plugin know who to talk to? Does it have a list
of LSID resolvers built into it, or sitting in a configuration file?
DNS resolvers have such a list - the set of root servers. There are
well-known ways to obtain this list. That kind of information is what
needs to be in an LSID HOWTO. (For SPARQL-based solutions this issue
would also have to be addressed somehow.)
Jonathan
On 7/12/07, Ricardo Pereira <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi all,
I just wanted to add to what Rod already said. There is a web
resolver at http://lsid.tdwg.org that you can use to resolve
LSIDs. The
BioPathways resolver isn't available anymore.
You may download a new version of the LSID Browser for
Firefox from
http://lsids.sourceforge.net <http://lsid.sourceforge.net>. Just
follow
the link to "Download (new)" and make sure you get version 1.0.1.
You
will find detailed instructions at
http://lsids.sourceforge.net/resources/firefox-lsid-browser/.
Cheers,
Ricardo
--
--
Mark Wilkinson
Assistant Professor, Dept. Medical Genetics
University of British Columbia
PI Bioinformatics
iCAPTURE Centre, St. Paul's Hospital
Tel: 604 682 2344 x62129
Fax: 604 806 9274
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