Re: [Digir-dev] Question on DiGIR Darwin Core and uniqueness of Catalog Numbers

[Jim C. <jr...@an...>]

>It was suggested very early on in the formation of GBIF that provision of 
>a service to resolve this exact issue should be a high priority.  The 
>relative political neutrality and high profile of GBIF provides a good 
>opportunity for a implementing a registry of institutions, preferably 
>based on the information stored in the registry of services (data 
>providers), that is the UDDI registry.
>
>The provision of unique institution codes would have provided the 
>infrastructure necessary to support truly unique identifiers for the 
>content being served through GBIF - that is, the specimen records.

Desirable, but it is not going to be easy to make it part of mainstream 
business...   I do not see the botanical community rushing to junk Index 
Herbariorum and take up new GBIF assigned IDs...  Kew will always be K, 
Leiden L, Missosuri MO and so on...

Political neutrality and high profile is no match for history, tradition 
and the forces of conservatism... :)

But it might be possible to induce Index Herbariorum to maintain a one to 
one map to teh GBIF IDs as part of their database so that botanists 
gradually get used to the concepts...

jim


~ Jim Croft ~ jr...@an... ~ 02-62465500 ~ www.anbg.gov.au/jrc/ ~