- From: M. Scott Marshall <marshall@science.uva.nl>
- Date: Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:09:38 +0200
- To: shared-names@googlegroups.com
- CC: Jonathan Rees <jar@creativecommons.org>, Tim Clark <tim_clark@harvard.edu>, W3C HCLSIG hcls <public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org>
Jonathan Rees wrote: > Thanks to Kaitlin Thaney for the following. > > http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaythaney/3592177513/ Jonathan's post reminds me of an issue that is important to knowledge sharing and has been on my mind lately: Scientists are often just as concerned about *who* said something as they are about *what* was said. The need to unequivocally identify a person is a requirement that comes about when we share knowledge because we need to know who has provided an assertion, and often, under what circumstances (i.e. with what evidence, measurements, etc.). Such 'knowledge provenance' is becoming increasingly important because systems are being developed that would make use of both manually curated facts and those computationally generated or 'mined'. This has been coming up in many different groups and events, including the HCLS Scientific Discourse and BioRDF task forces, myExperiment, HypER http://hyp-er.wik.is/ , and likely Sage[1]. Apparently, this topic also came up at the International Repositories Infrastructure Workshop where Jonathan was present[0]. The similarity between the requirements for shared names, in general, and 'people identifiers', in particular, is readily apparent: we would like unambiguous and permanent URI's to be provided from an authoritative and neutral source. I don't know about you but if Shared Names offered people identifiers, it would be my preferred approach. However, Shared Names has limited the scope to GO dbx records for the moment. Are there alternatives to the DIY do-it-yourself approach for those who need people identifiers *today*? The only thing that I can think of is WikiPeople[2] (which could create an awkward situation if someone else with the name Michael Scott Marshall creates a page, who wants to be M. Scott Marshall 2?). Oh wait, there's more at a Crossref blog [3], although I don't think that sharing hypothetical information with other scientists shouldn't require you to have an 'author number'. One thing that I like about WikiPeople is that it puts identity in the hands of the owners of the identity. Unfortunately, I think that a code is required instead of a name to truly scale. Also, I suppose that the most surefire way to ensure that an identity system doesn't get messy is to require authentication e.g. a certificate from a Certificate Authority that has high requirements for authentication such as presenting a passport. Such levels of authentication are currently required for European and Dutch grid certificates (finally, a use for such seemingly exaggerated grid-burocracy!). -Scott [0] http://maurice.vanderfeesten.name/blog/2009/03/20/international-repositories-infrastructure-workshop-persistent-identifiers/ [1] http://blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk/index.php/2009/05/sage-has-its-time-a-large-scale-open-access-resource-for-systems-biologists/ [2] http://proteins.wikiprofessional.org/index.php?title=%20WikiPeople&action=edit [3] http://www.crossref.org/crweblog/2009/04/the_buzz_around_people_identif.html -- M. Scott Marshall (still have to get a PURL ;) ) http://staff.science.uva.nl/~marshall http://adaptivedisclosure.org
Received on Friday, 3 July 2009 17:10:04 UTC