How committed is the Architecture WS identifiers SIG to LSIDs? Can we rely on this technology decision to remain stable?
The identifiers SIG believes this choice to be stable. However, we also believe the underlying LSID specification will change and will need to change to accommodate future needs. These changes will not affect the LSID itself, but rather the identifier resolution infrastructure and the service contracts between data providers and clients. Work must be undertaken to isolate the caBIG community from these changes as much as possible through common wrapper libraries and tools. However, it may be impossible to isolate caBIG users (especially data providers) from all changes. Parallel to these development efforts, caBIG, as the largest scale deployment of LSIDs, must engage the LSID community to help adapt the standard to address some of the complex issues not addressed in the current version of the standard, issues which are likely to be shared by other current and future LSID users.
