Phillip Lord wrote:
Actually, LSIDs are domain specific, or rather they were designed to support
the needs of the Life Sciences; this is not to say that different domains do
not have the same needs.
You're right, that's a better way to put it!
Look at DOIs and LSIDs. They are different, they emphasise different
things. LSIDs are based around a set of objects which potentially might be
very large and which might exist in many versions. So LSIDs have two-step
multi-protocol resolution. They have version numbers integrated. They exist
in a world where services disappear. So LSIDs have a fail over mechanism.
If I have an LSID like urn:lsid:uniprot.org:uniprot:P12345 and uniprot.org
disappears (assuming there was even a resolver running there in the first
place), how is that URI going to be more useful than a simple HTTP URL like
http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345? If you are lucky and happen to have
a copy on some local server (which you may prefer to use even otherwise),
what's the big deal with using a normal, off-the shelf URL rewriting proxy?
DOIs worked because there are actually relatively few publishers and they
moved on mass. In biology there are many more service providers, and most will
not adopt something till it looks stable and until people really bitch about
wanting it.
Perhaps as important as "what are the requirements" is "what is practical".
