[MOBY] Re: [MOBY-l] Name Space

[Boris Steipe]

On Wednesday, Feb 11, 2004, at 17:16 Canada/Eastern, Mark Wilkinson 
wrote:

Again: what would prevent you from constructing and using them "as if"? 
I don't think the potential amount of migration would be larger 
(probably smaller) than migrating say, all the moby LSIDs to whatever 
their proper authority is once that authority starts using proper 
LSIDS. Remember, you are supposed to commit to keeping LSIDs 
permanently, for hundreds of years. Do you really want to do that ? On 
the other hand I could not imagine that you would even *allow* e.g. a 
biomoby.org:pubmed to diverge in its semantics from the NCBI one.

I would suggest not assigning biomoby.org LSIDs but simply and 
pragmatically requiring an object to disambiguate its namespace by 
providing an authority. Then everyone could create/maintain their own 
namespaces - either semantically linking them to another provider's 
definition through the domain name, or rolling their own. The nice 
thing is that this would be forward compatible. Whether this tuple is 
prefixed by nothing or by urn:lsid doesn't really make a difference, 
does it ? And even if it did, it would make more sense to use 
urn:biomoby_id:authority:ns    ...

To my mind, the neatest thing about the LSIDs is not their resolve to 
maintain universal and permanent identifiers, but the elegant way of 
piggybacking on the ICANN solution to creating unique namespaces.

Sense ?


B.

(Or maybe I should start registering a batch of biomoby.org namespaces 
as a potential source of future income... Hm.   ;-)


> yes, that was the plan... and in effect it still *is* the plan.
> However, I cannot assign LSID's arbitrarily to another authority (this
> is something they must do on their own), so for the moment all 
> namespace
> identifiers are in the "biomoby.org" LSID authority, and thus we have 
> to
> be careful of collisions.
>
> Once LSID's become more widespread we will certainly stop using our own
> LSID authority prefix and use the "genuine" one, as assigned by the 
> true
> naming authority, but until then... we're stuck.
>
> M
>
>
> On Wed, 2004-02-11 at 17:37, Boris Steipe wrote:
>> 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/
>>
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> -- 
> Mark Wilkinson <markw at illuminae.com>
> Illuminae
> _______________________________________________
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>

Best regards,


Boris

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