Thanks for your comments, Eric.
On Aug 26, 2007, at 3:51 PM, Eric Neumann wrote:
In an attempt to modulate the tone a bit, it's clear that with such
a large and complex group of people and communities, many who had
not been part of earlier OMG/I3C discussions are not aware of all
the details of what had been discussed, proposed, and recommended.
Having been a LSR-OMG chair many years ago, I know what it takes to
put RFPs through DTC, PTC, and AB mechanisms at OMG. A lot of
careful technical forethought and agreeing has to go in to it...
At the same time, many groups in biological data and identifier
discussions are still getting up to speed what is meant by web
uniqueness and resolution within the W3C world. It's always easier
to respond to messages than to review the massive amount of
technical papers on the subject (I think simple tech/usage
summaries are often lacking). But this seems to lead to a lot of
earlier email discussions coming up again and again, i.e., info
equilibration. As well as the side effect of evoking emotions when
not intended...
I would be interested in reviewing earlier email. Can you tell me
(us) the location of relevant archives, other than those for public-
semweb-lifesci? I have searched in vain for LSID archives a few
times, and it would be interesting to read the deliberations that led
to, say, the rejection of the handle system. Also if you have a list
of technical papers to review, or a strategy for finding the right
ones, I would appreciate hearing about it. We have a few papers
listed on the wiki (including I think the ones Sean gave last summer
for LSID), but I would certainly expect that there are more that are
pertinent.
My guess is all sides here can provide an 80-90% technical solution
to the main set of data issues raised. That is not the main point
of our discussions though. In going forwards we need to also think
about learning from past attempts (successes and partial
successes), what factors help things "catch on" more quickly and
are easy to implement/adopt, and where do data providers and
consumers (including the non-informatics people) want to be in 2-5
years? I think we will be capturing most of these shortly, and I
look forwards to lots of useable contributions.
This is a good idea. I would love to hear accounts of identifier
schemes "in the wild". I think I understand LSIDs and handles in the
abstract, but don't have a good sense of which particular aspects of
the various schemes are really used to good effect in running
applications and other artifacts.
Of course, requirements are not always comparaible. A lot of the
trouble we're having is that we're looking at terms for use in
knowledge representation, a use case not anticipated by most
identifier schemes.
Jonathan
