Time for more half-baked ideas. There's been a lot of discussion on Twitter about EOL, Linked Data (sometimes abbreviated LOD), and Wikipedia. Pete DeVries (@pjd) is keen on LOD, and has been asking why TDWG isn't playing in this space. I've been muttering dark thoughts about EOL, and singing the praises of Wikipedia. On so it goes on. So, here's one vision of where we could (?should) be going with this.

PLoS Computational Biolgy has recently published "Adventures in Semantic Publishing: Exemplar Semantic Enhancements of a Research Article" (doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000361) by David Shotton and colleagues. As a proof of concept, they took Reis et al. (doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0000228) and "semantically enhanced" it: The enhanced article is here: doi:10.1371/journal.pntd.0000228.x001.

The LSID discussion has flared up (again) on the TDWG mailing lists. This discussion keeps coming around (I've touched on it here and here), this time it was sparked by the LSID SourceForge site being broken (the part where you get the code is OK). Some of the issues being raised include: Nobody uses LSIDs except the biodiversity informatics crowd, have we missed something?

While biodiversity informatics putters along, generating loads of globally unique identifiers that nobody else uses, perhaps it's time to take a look at the bigger picture. DBPedia is an effort to extract data from Wikipedia and make it available as linked data. At the heart of this effort is the use of HTTP URIs to identify resources, and reusing those URIs. Hence, for many concepts DBpedia URIs are the default option.