Re: URL +1, LSID -1

Hi there.  I've been lurking here for a while - since Mark mentioned  
me I guess its time to throw in a few more cents into this already  
overflowing pot.

What I meant to suggest to him was that someone really needs to write  
a reasonably simple ~client (not server...) program that would let  
people follow their nose programmatically to LSID resolution.  I  
managed to get the Java client code from IBM (http://tinyurl.com/ 
2hvjf6 ) running this morning, but a) it was a pain and b) of the few  
lsids I had on hand, only one of them worked.

urn:lsid:biomoby.org:objectclass:DNASequence:2001-09-21T16-00-00Z

I'm pretty new (and hesitant to join) the standards wars, but I think  
there is really a lot of power in the "he who codes first [and best]"  
wins" argument.  For those of you arguing for the adoption of LSIDs,  
IMHO, the most powerful thing you could really do at this point would  
be to step up and take over the development of the (as far as I can  
tell) abandoned code stack at the often-discussed sourceforge site.    
Given their experience using lsids, the BioMoby team (sorry Ed..) is  
really the most likely candidate to do this effectively.

Philosophical and futurist arguments aside, the technical weight of  
the enormous amount of code and number of people that already  
understand URLs and (do not understand URNs), seems to be winning the  
argument all by itself.

-Ben

On Jul 12, 2007, at 8:20 AM, Mark Wilkinson wrote:

>
> I suspect that the firefox plugin, like the resolver client that we  
> have implemented here
> http://mobycentral.icapture.ubc.ca:8090/authority/data/ 
> LSID_resolver.jsp
> both resolve LSIDs the way they are supposed to:  By discovery of  
> the appropriate resolver using the discovery methodology defined by  
> the LSID spec.
>
> In the easiest case, all the information you need to discover a  
> resolver is in the LSID itself.  In the worst case, it is somewhere  
> in the DNS system, but discoverable using the LSID itself... so  
> there's really nothing to worry about.  There's no "centralization"  
> happening in LSIDs.
>
> Ben Good suggested to me yesterday that I should put up a blog of  
> "LSIDs in 10 minutes" showing the code required to implement an  
> authority server and a resolver server.  ...I wish I didn't have  
> four grants due in two weeks!!
>
> M
>
>
>
> On Thu, 12 Jul 2007 06:20:00 -0700, Jonathan Rees  
> <jonathan.rees@gmail.com> 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
>
>
>
> -- 
> --
> Mark Wilkinson
> Assistant Professor, Dept. Medical Genetics
> University of British Columbia
> PI Bioinformatics
> iCAPTURE Centre, St. Paul's Hospital
> Tel:  604 682 2344 x62129
> Fax:  604 806 9274
>
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Received on Thursday, 12 July 2007 18:49:22 UTC