Re: URL +1, LSID -1

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



On 12 Jul 2007, at 14:20, Jonathan Rees wrote:

> When I asked for a HOWTO I meant something a bit more general and
> protocol oriented. Surely you're not advising that a new semweb
> application should link against Firefox, or that it should have a
> particular LSID resolver address wired in. As Mark W has pointed out,
> a single point of failure and contention is not a good thing.
>
> How does the Firefox plugin know who to talk to? Does it have a list
> of LSID resolvers built into it, or sitting in a configuration file?
> DNS resolvers have such a list - the set of root servers. There are
> well-known ways to obtain this list. That kind of information is what
> needs to be in an LSID HOWTO. (For SPARQL-based solutions this issue
> would also have to be addressed somehow.)
>
> Jonathan
>
> On 7/12/07, Ricardo Pereira <ricardo@tdwg.org> wrote:
>>     Hi all,
>>
>>     I just wanted to add to what Rod already said. There is a web
>> resolver at http://lsid.tdwg.org that you can use to resolve  
>> LSIDs. The
>> BioPathways resolver isn't available anymore.
>>
>>     You may download a new version of the LSID Browser for Firefox  
>> from
>> http://lsids.sourceforge.net <http://lsid.sourceforge.net>. Just  
>> follow
>> the link to "Download (new)" and make sure you get version 1.0.1. You
>> will find detailed instructions at
>> http://lsids.sourceforge.net/resources/firefox-lsid-browser/.
>>
>>     Cheers,
>>
>> Ricardo
>

----------------------------------------
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