[MOBY-l] Name Space

[Boris Steipe]

On Wednesday, Feb 11, 2004, at 16:18 Canada/Eastern, Vijay Narayanasamy 
wrote:

> Hi Mark,
>  
> I want a NameSpace for Agricola.
>  
> In the GO http://www.geneontology.org/doc/GO.xrf_abbs there are three
> entries for Agricola.
>  
> 'NAL', 'bib' and 'IND'
>  

What happened to the idea of namespacing like in LSIDs i.e. making a 
namespace valid only in the context of its issuing authority and thus 
effectively using the (working, sort of) ICANN resolution mechanism to 
ensure that namespaces remain unique ?

The LSID of the object that Vijay describes apparently would be:
urn:lsid:agricola.cos.com:IND:84014403

The huge advantage is that this distributes the task of maintaining 
namespaces to the data providers - no need to register with a central 
authority.

Sure, LSIDs are meant to be permanent and not every provider supports 
them yet, but that does not prevent anyone from using the principle on 
accession numbers from elsewhere, even if the other authority has no 
mechanism to ensure uniqueness and permanence in place - it just 
wouldn't be a proper LSID yet, even if it would be structured like one. 
But it would still serve the purpose at least as well as what's 
available already.

I can't remember what the plan was, regarding that concept.

Best regards,


Boris

---
Boris Steipe
University of Toronto
Program in Proteomics & Bioinformatics
Departments of Biochemistry & Molecular and Medical Genetics
http://biochemistry.utoronto.ca/steipe/