[Taxacom] AMNH, spiders, and LSIDs

[Richard Pyle]

Thanks, Norm -- Glad to hear you're on the case!  I have a tiy bit of
experience/understanding in setting up LSID resolvers, and that continues to
grow. I learned basically everything I know about it from Kevin Richards,
and I am using code created by him written in MS VB.NET; so he is clearly in
a better position than I for responding (as are others in the context of
other platforms).  Kevin and I drafted some documents to help people
implement LSID resolvers, and I believe those resources (and others) are
available online (though I don't have the URLs handy).  Best place to start
would be http://www.tdwg.org/activities/guid/.

In any case, though I am clearly not the most knowledgable person (by any
stretch), I would certainly be willing to assist your programmers in any way
I can (my scope of insight, shallow though it is, is limited to IIS and
VB.NET implementations).

Aloha,
Rich

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Norman I. Platnick [mailto:platnick at amnh.org] 
> Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 2:56 AM
> To: Richard Pyle
> Cc: 'Roderic Page'; 'Kevin Richards'; taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] AMNH, spiders, and LSIDs
> 
> Thanks, Richard.  I'm fully aware that AMNH does not yet have 
> a functioning LSID resolver; the folks who maintain our 
> research site have been charged with creating that facility.  
> Robert Raven (who handles the database conversions of the 
> spider catalog information) and I decided that it was useful 
> to make the LSIDs available to the arachnological community 
> in advance of that facility, so that our colleagues could 
> begin to plan to incorporate the LSIDs into their databases 
> and websites.  Some of those colleagues have been requesting 
> such links for several years now, but we preferred to wait 
> until GBIF had announced the format decisions.  It is 
> certainly our intention that the LSIDs remain permanently 
> attached to the currently valid names, and also to new names, 
> should synonymies, transfers, or other nomenclatorial actions 
> affect their validity.  The spider catalog is updated on the 
> web only twice a year, and since we had the capability of 
> adding the LSIDs now, we saw no reason to delay making them 
> available for another six months.
> 
> >direct them to resources that might guide them to rectifying their 
> >shortcomings
> I would be delighted to pass any such directions along to the 
> programmers who will be creating the resolver, as I think so 
> far they've found rather scant resources available to help 
> them!  Cheers, Norm Platnick
> 
> --
> Dr. Norman I. Platnick
> Peter J. Solomon Family Curator of Spiders Division of 
> Invertebrate Zoology American Museum of Natural History 
> Central Park West at 79th Street New York NY 10024
> 
> phone:  212-769-5612
> fax:    212-769-5277
> email:  platnick at amnh.org
> 
> See the World Spider Catalog, version 8.5, at 
> http://research.amnh.org/entomology/spiders/catalog/index.html
> 
> See the goblin spider Planetary Biodiversity Inventory 
> website, at http://research.amnh.org/oonopidae
>