The main problem with LSIDs

As one of the authors of a paper that espoused LSIDs as a great idea and complained about their lack of adoption by the community, I feel obliged to come out and say that I've come to the conclusion that we should not be using them at all (for the time being).

The fundamental problems with LSIDs are the first two symbols in the acronym. If they were simply The Identifier System and thus were not constrained from the beginning to operate in the comparatively small world of the life sciences, the proposal might have stood a chance of working. I think they were really just not ambitious enough. It really is a fantastic bit of work, this paper describing the need for and the implementation of the spec is one of the best works on data integration that I have come across. But, the fact remains that, with a few exceptions, no one has adopted the spec because (IMHO) developers prefer to work with the most widely accepted standards (e.g. those from the W3C) so they don't end up having to re-implement everything when new standards replace the old ones. (There is also the issue of the need for registries but I think that is secondary).

So, until we get to the point where Sun provides a built-in Java class called LSID with methods like getMetaData and getData that I can call with the same ease as the HTTP get method, I think I'll wait with everyone else.

identity

This idea came up in the context of a discussion regarding our summer boot camp for incoming students. We are just trying to think of something for them to do that will teach them about the semantic web but that might also lead to something interesting. Right now, all roads seems to be leading me to identity.. Before reading on, you may find the links here useful - particularly Dick Hardt's video presentation.

In the context of data integration, establishing identity is a crucial first step (see LSID papers here for more explanation http://www.connotea.org/user/bgood/tag/LSID). In the wild world of WebX.0, the most critical entities in need of unambiguous identification are people. If we had a consistent, coherent system for establishing who (in a global fashion) is the Mark Wilkinson attempting to buy that house - or attempting to edit my wiki - or answer my icapturer question - or is the author of which paper, then we would have at least two obvious, immediate advantages; 1) when, as open-input application developers we need to make decisions about who to trust, we can use the meta-data associated with the putative person on the other end of the wire to do so, 2) we would have a coherent, once again global, way to give credit where it is do. The real-world would not work the way it does if it were anonymous.. an LSID-based identity management system for the Web might just make things on the Web a bit more real.

Specifically we would need to:
a) build the relevant LSID bits (the resolver, lsid assigner , etc.)
b) Provide a website where people could sign up for their own LSID
c) Use the LSIDs as the identity nodes for the Wilkinson Lab Semantic Web
d) Define an extension to FOAF (if required) that lets us make statements about trust.. and reason over them
e) Use FOAF and our own trust ontology to define a consistent structure for the RDF meta-data associated with each LSID. (Add all the usual who knows who, who wrote what bits as well..)
f) Make a demo website - maybe a wiki for the lab since we need one anyway - that utilizes the the personal LSIDs for semantic user-validation
g) read the book "True Names" by Vernor Vinge which described the importance of this concept for cyberspace 26 years ago.