[DAS2] approval and maintenance of DAS/2 URI namespaces

[Garret Wilson]

I read the "list of global identifiers based on community consensus" at:

http://www.biodas.org/wiki/GlobalSeqIDs

It's great the DAS/2 is using URIs for global identification. For 
example, chromosome 1 for the B36.1 human genome assembly is identified 
by the URI:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/H_sapiens/B36.1/dna/chr1

I'm unclear, however, regarding NCBI knowledge, participation, and 
maintenance of these URIs. The system of uniform resource identifiers 
prevents name clashes by delegating to the IANA-governed domain-name 
system, so that whoever owns a particular domain-based namespace can 
manage the URIs within that namespace.

If DAS/2 were to use, for example, the http://www.biodas.org/genome/ 
namespace to manage all genome assembly URIs, I would have no cause for 
concern. DAS/2 is instead using several namespaces managed by other 
parties. I hope the response is that the NCBI is fully aware that its 
URI namespace is being used as authoritative genome assembly URIs and 
has either committed to maintaining that namespace or has delegated 
maintenance of the http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genome/ namespace to DAS. 
(If the latter is true, it is unclear which organization would receive 
such a delegation of maintenance responsibility---the Open 
Bioinformatics Foundation? The BioTeam?)

Thanks for any clarifications---this question is raised solely out of a 
desire for long-term standards that can be use consistently by the 
community.

Garret