Re: URL +1, LSID -1

I must have misspoken. What I meant is this.  Suppose I have an LSID
(used as a URI sensu semantic web) that I got from email or a
scientific publication, and I want to know more about the resource
that it denotes. That is, I want some metadata for the resource, at
the very least. My understanding is that to do this, you're supposed
to talk to an LSID resolution service. In order to do that, you need
to be acquainted with such a service.

I'm not that interested in what is allowed or required; I'm interested
in "best practices" for semantic web applications, and in particular
the automated case, not browsers.

Correct me if I'm wrong: Best practice is:
   - if you have a list of LSID resolvers, or maybe HTTP bridges to
some LSID resolvers, use those; maybe you got them from a friend, or
they were wired into some software distribution(s)
   - otherwise, use DDDS or SRV: contact the authority via DNS
protocol, get location of resolver
   - otherwise, maybe the authority itself has a resolver at
http://foo.bar:8080/authority where foo.bar = the authority name
(thanks Mark W)
   - otherwise, if the authority is offline, repurposed, or hostile,
start using google, email, your rolodex, and your librarian to track
down a resolver that knows about the LSID

This is similar to what I'd do for an HTTP URI: prior list of SPARQL
endpoints or caches of metadata-carrying files, then DNS/HTTP to
contact the named server (allowing for redirection, then using the
current awful bag of hacks to guess where the metadata is), then
wayback machine or Google cache (no LSID equivalent yet?), then pull
out the big guns.

It would be nice if the process for getting metadata (and data!) for
resources identified by HTTP URIs were more systematic. The proposals
I've heard are all awful, but I think it's a good thing to work on.

Jonathan

On 7/12/07, Roderic Page <r.page@bio.gla.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> I'm a little confused. Are you asking how do we find LSIDs that exist (i.e.,
> some sort of discovery process)?
>
> I think most people intend LSIDs to be identifiers, e.g., they would appear
> in a list of search results, be cited in a paper, web page, or other
> document (such as an email message, a RDF document, etc.). In this way they
> are like DOIs. I wouldn't  particularly want to know what DOIs are out
> there, I'd want the DOI for  a paper I'm looking at, and given a DOI I'd
> want a way to resolve it.
>
> There is a well described protocol for resolving a given LSID. The initial
> step is looking up the authority server in the DNS. The FireFox client
> doesn't seem to do this, by default it uses a CGI script to do
> this look-up. Other clients, such as the Java, Perl, and PHP ones (at least)
> talk to the DNS directly.
>
> Regards
>
> Rod

Received on Thursday, 12 July 2007 16:04:36 UTC