Hi Axel,


#3 Opacity: I will stress the importance of the opacity best practice for PUID name strings. How about reformulation as: "No information on the entity should be inferrable from the PUID name string alone"? See eg. GBIF (2011) [1] (page 9).


#9 Compatibility: I agree that naming accession number as local identifier is an unfortunate and bad wording. How about "traditional identifier" or perhaps "verbatim identifier"? I fully agree that keeping the accession numbers as the most common identifiers in communication between humans remains the most pragmatic option!


#13 Acquisition costs: There will anyway be costs for maintaining any PUID system. The interesting question is rather the most cost effective solution, where the costs saved are higher than the investments. If more costly investments in acquisition of eg. DOIs result in much higher cost-savings in operation of the GLIS, then these investments are justified!


#14 Acceptance by publishers: Perhaps use the accession number in the body text of the manuscript and include the PUID in the reference list for each accession - possibly using a PUID for the dataset or collection if the number of accessions are too large?


I am also concerned with the risk of setting new PUIDs for everything. Whenever there is a n existing and good-enough PUID for any given thing, best practice is (generally) to use this existing PUID and not generate any new PUID.


"each thing has one and only one identifier

each identifier refers to one and only one thing" (Coyle, 20016)


Coyle, Karen. (2006, July). Identifiers: Unique, persistent, global. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(4), 428- 431.


INSTCODE + ACCENUMB

Your pragmatic suggestion to use the WIEWS institution codes pluss the accession number as the PUID (?) is in fact already a very common approach for many datasets published in GBIF - and a recommendation of the Darwin Core standard [2]. The format used is urn:catalog:INSTCODE:[Collection code:]ACCENUMB (collection code is a code for the sub-collection of material conserved at the institute) and often called a Darwin Core Triplett. However, this approach has well-known and documented problems (Guralnick et al. 2014) [3].


[1] http://www.gbif.org/resource/80575

[2] http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/#occurrenceID

[3] http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0114069 


Best regards

Dag




From: Global Information System on PGRFA <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Diederichsen, Axel <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 26 February 2015 06:12
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: W1 -Task Force on Permanent Unique Identifiers: Requirements
 

Dear Colleagues,

 

In the attached I inserted a few comments.

 

As I see the PUI from the ongoing discussions, this concept will, if accepted in the broad sense, grow exponentially at rate that ridicules the snowball effect. If all things listed in the initial e-mail (genebank accessions, fragments of them, seed lots, selections, gene sequences, individuals, publications…) will receive a PUI this will not help the cause of the GLIS but create a global and eventually cosmic catalogue of everything. The GlIS has not this purpose. I think we need to restrict this and perhaps need to focus more on what we want to achieve, and not so much on what machines can all do. I would suggest a very pragmatic approach. The old FAO WEWS system had unique institution codes, which could be followed by the accession identifier in the respective institution. That could serve as a PUI and restrict this concept to genebank accessions to start with.

 

As this suggestion may be too simplistic, I in any case need to strongly advice not to strive replacing the genebank accession numbers, which have a different nature but very useful purpose. I also strictly oppose to degrade in wording an accession number of an organized genebank to a local identifier. It is a well accepted and useful identifier of a usually living entity that can be heterogeneous, changes over time, ages, dies, mutates and needs for sure a lot of care. I saw some wording in that suggest accession numbers are outdated.

 

Best regards,

 

Axel Diederichsen

 

From: Global Information System on PGRFA [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dag Endresen
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 11:56 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: W1 -Task Force on Permanent Unique Identifiers: Requirements

 

Regarding #21 Identification of fragments, I agree with the concern raised by Eugene and Stephan. My understanding of what could be an example of a fragment (of an accession entity) might be seeds of an accession from a given harvest year (I have seen this thing to be called a batch). And if there is a need to identify such "fragment"-things, a clean opaque PUID for such things would generally be preferred compared to to appending codes to the accession-level PUID identifier string. Perhaps there are other use cases, but in general I agree with these concerns.

 

Dag

 


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