HCLSIG BioRDF Subgroup/Meetings/2006-07-31 Conference Call

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Conference Details

  • Date of Call: Monday July 31, 2006
  • Time of Call: 11:00am Eastern Time
  • Dial-In #: +1.617.761.6200 (Cambridge, MA)
  • Participant Access Code: 246733 ("BIORDF")
  • IRC Channel: irc.w3.org port 6665 channel #BioRDF (see W3C IRC page for details, or see Web IRC)
  • Duration: ~1 hour
  • Convener: Susie Stephens
  • Scribe: Olivier Bodenreider


Participants: Sean Martin, Jack Park, Olivier Bodenreider, Satya Sahoo, Eric Neumann, Daniel Rubin, John Barkley, Carole Goble, Daniele Turi, Alan Ruttenburg, Susie Stephens, John Doherty, Chimezie Ogbuji, Davide Zaccagnini, Dan Connolly, Kei Cheung, Scott Marshall, Ivan Hermann, Matthias Samwald, Joanne Luciano, Bill Bug, Tim Clark, Jonathan Rees, Tanya Grey, Andy Seaborne, Kerstin Forsberg.

Introductions

- Jack Park from the AI Lab at SRI, Menlo Park
- Carole Goble and Daniele Turi, from the University of Manchester, UK
- Tanya Gray (FuGO)

Resource identifiers: URI vs. LSID (and ARK)

See the wiki page on URI best practices for additional information.

There has been a lot of debate lately on the list regarding resource identifiers. Some of the issues were summarized by Eric Neumann (see this post). The objective of this call is to help the BioRDF group better understand how to identify entities in RDF, to provide guidance to institutions such as NCBI and to determine requirements through use cases.

There are three major identification mechanisms:
- LSID -- Life Science Identifier, promoted by the Life Sciences community (see http://lsid.sourceforge.net/). Examples of applications using LSID include Taverna and the BioPathways Consortium.
- Solutions based on the HTTP protocol (Unified Resource Identifiers (URIs), Names (URNs) and Locators (URLs)), promoted by the W3C (see this W3C document).
- ARK -- Archive Resource Key, promoted by the Digital Library community (see ARK specifications here).

The issues discussed include: - Location independence: (achieved by LSID and ARK, which supports several possible http prefixes)
- Backward compatibility
- Resolution mechanism (local resolution through a proxy vs. global resolution; LSID uses DDDS (Dynamic Delegation Discovery System) for its resolution)
- Resolvability and versioning (e.g., the LSID versioning policy causes its version number to change any time the resource changes; granularity of change; changes to data vs. metadata; related issues with caching)

Decisions: - Create 4 new focus areas on the wiki page under URI best practices (http://esw.w3.org/topic/HCLSIG_BioRDF_Subgroup/Tasks/URI_Best_Practices):
• /Versioning
• /Metadata
• /Location Independence
• /Resolving LSID

(were these really group decisions? I don't remember any questions put to the group. -- DanConnolly)

News

- HCLS Workshop at ISWC 2006 -- see the Call for papers

Next meeting

Next meeting: August 14, 2006
(Task update by Matthias Samwald)