Re: LSIDs and ontology segmentation

Hi All,
    What Mark points out, quoted below, is absolutely correct.  In the 
NCBI prototype ontologies, every OWL Class and Property has its own LSID 
and resolves to the small amount of RDF that encapsulates it.  As an 
example, resolve the LSID for the OMIM ontology

urn:lsid:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.lsid.biopathways.org:ontologies:MIM

in Firefox Launchpad via: 
lsidres:urn:lsid:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.lsid.biopathways.org:ontologies:MIM. One 
can navigate the entire ontology by surfing the LSID metadata associated 
with each ontology node. 


> Here is where I think the LSID could really shine!  Unlike a URL, the
> LSID does not have to return an entire document in response to a
> getMetaData call.  Thus, if an LSID were used as the identifier for an
> ontology node, the behaviour of the getMetadata call could be, by
> convention or by standard, to return only the relevant ontology
> fragment, where that fragment was generated by e.g. the Rector
> Segmentation generator in the background.

Ben Szekely
IBM Software Engineer
Advanced Internet Technology, Cambridge, MA
bhszekel@us.ibm.com