Balaji S. Srinivasan wrote:
It would seem to me that the best way to get a reliable set of
canonical URIs is to get NCBI involved. As soon as NCBI published a
set of canonical URIs (e.g. for genes in Entrez Gene, compounds in
Pubchem, etc.) then everyone could use them with confidence. Reasons:
Yes. Persistence is achieved through *practice* but not technology.
LSID seems "persistent" because it makes the owner of the URI less
obvious. But in practice, who can guarantee that one LSID will be there
forever, and not be resolved to a different resource 10 or 50 years from
now? The "persistent" effect of LSID is achieved psychologically but not
technologically. I just don't know why people don't get it. Getting
NCBI or any similar kind of authoritative figure involved will
definitely makes people feel the "persistence" of an HTTP URI.
Xiaoshu
