[Taxacom] LSID versus names

Wed Jun 20 14:11:51 CDT 2012

Dear Rich,

You want the world to be one way, but it's the other way.

Regards

Rod

On 20 Jun 2012, at 18:54, Richard Pyle wrote:

> I think you missed my point.  UUIDs are stunningly gorgeous to the intended audience: computers.  They’re particularly powerful when you combine them with a resolution service operating on http protocol.   We’ve simply got to stop this nonsense that we should choose GUIDs that are pleasant for humans to look at.  We’ve had this conversation before (several times). I’ve also had the same conversation with Roger (See Dima’s replies to Roger’s blog).  That just leads to the sort of comments like Chris’, suggesting that GUIDs will replace scientific names.  That is no more likely to happen than scientific names will be useful as unambiguous identifiers to cross-link digital information.
>  
> We already have identifiers that are not “ugly” to people: they’re called scientific names, and they follow a convention that has been in use literally for centuries.  We should stop using them (scientific names) for human-human communication or computer-human communication only when the benefits of using them cease to outweigh the costs of doing so.  But we are being foolish to shape identifiers meant for computer-computer communication in such a way that they are aesthetically pleasing to humans.
>  
> In any case, I wholeheartedly agree with your last sentence, except I would modify the ending: “…tackle that, and people will probably never see the ugliness.”
>  
> Rich
>  
> From: Roderic Page [mailto:r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk] 
> Sent: Tuesday, June 19, 2012 11:14 PM
> To: TAXACOM
> Cc: Jim Croft; Chris Thompson; Neal Evenhuis; Frederick W. Schueler; Stephen Thorpe; Richard Pyle
> Subject: Re: [Taxacom] LSID versus names
>  
> Dear Rich,
>  
> You have about as much chance convincing anyone that UUIDs are beautiful as I have of convincing taxonomists to not change bionomials when shifting names across genera ;)
>  
> I understand the advantages of UUIDs, and I know you argue that in an ideal world we'd not see identifiers. But there are reasons not to like UUIDs (http://www.hyam.net/blog/archives/90 ), and the reality is we see (and use) identifiers all the time. Indeed, a lot of the much-touted benefits of identifiers (e.g., cut and paste identifier to get reference, see who is mentioning your article on Twitter by searching for the DOI, retrieve a DNA sequence from GenBank, etc.) depend on people using identifiers. We use URLs all the time, for example. Indeed, being able to see identifiers is often important for building trust (I believe I'm handing over my credit card details to someone trustworthy because it says "apple.com" in the URL, for example).
>  
> A related issue is whether identifiers are "hackable", that is, whether I can interpret what they mean and edit them to get something else. For example, if I have an identifier for an article that include the volume, can I shorten the identifier and get information on the volume? Obviously this can be problematic, but clearly taxonomists like hackable identifiers, otherwise they wouldn't embed meaning into names (e.g., if I shorten "Homo sapiens" to "Homo" and search for that I'll find other things related to "Homo sapiens") (oh the irony). UUIDs are not hackable, which could be regarded as a strength, but in some respects this can be a disadvantage as it thwarts discovery and debugging.
>  
> As much as you might wish that people didn't look at identifiers, they do. If you wanted to design a less user-friendly identifier designed to alienate reluctant users then you couldn't have done better than pick UUIDs ;) Regardless of the technical reasons for choosing them, they've done you no favours in encouraging adoption.
>  
> I suspect much of this would be moot if the identifiers were perceived as adding significant value, and not merely large globs of indigestible text. This is the real problem, tackle that, and people will probably see past the ugliness.
>  
> Regards
>  
> Rod
>  
>  
> On 20 Jun 2012, at 09:34, Richard Pyle wrote:
> 
> 
> and some example are ugly e.g., those that use UUIDs, such as the
> examples you gave earlier, and the ones issued by ZooBank
> (note that you don't have to make such ugly LSIDs).
> 
> "Ugly"??  Seriously?  You're worried about "ugly"?!?  Ugly to whom?  To you?
> A human?  C'mon Rod -- you can do better than "ugly"!  You're absolutely
> right about LSIDs.  I'm astonished that you still cling to the "ugly"
> argument against UUIDs!  The sooner we can get past this foolish notion that
> GUIDs are supposed to be optimized for human eyeballs, the better.
> 
> Rich
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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> 
>  
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Roderic Page
> Professor of Taxonomy
> Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
> College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
> Graham Kerr Building
> University of Glasgow
> Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
> 
> Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
> Tel: +44 141 330 4778
> Fax: +44 141 330 2792
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>  

---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
Skype: rdmpage
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1112517192
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rdmpage
Blog: http://iphylo.blogspot.com
Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html