Eco Grid Identifiers

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DRAFT FOR COMMENTS

EcoGrid needs to provide a consistent identification scheme for data objects and metadata records in the system, among other things. This identifier format should allow for the creation of globally unique identifiers, hopefully with a local part that is assigned at the participating service rather than centrally.

Proposed Identifer Formats

In the past meetings we've discussed trying to standardize our identifier formats, but so far none of the systems (srb, metacat, etc) will accept identifers of the format we've discussed. In Edinburgh, our proposed ID format was:

urn:ecogrid://scope/localIdentifier

where scope is a symbolic name from the registry that can be used to look up the wsdl (and therefore endpoint) of the EcoGrid query service.

However, we've also discussed using LSID's as the taxon group is doing, which take the form:

URN:LSID:authority:namespace:objectId:revision

The revision is optional, and taxon and ecogrid have both agreed that it should NOT be used (and that any versioning information belongs in the metadata). The authority is a DNS name that resolves via DNS to a service that can be used to resolve the LSID to actual physical locations. 'Namespace' is analogous to our 'scope', and 'objectId' is analogous to our 'localIdentifier'. So, this is similar to our proposal above, but relies on DNS instead of our registry for the resolution service.

References

LSID Specification

LSID Java Tutorial

EcoGridCommunity

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This particular version was published on 03-Sep-2004 08:52:53 PDT by NCEAS.jones.