Shared Names Project: Linking Biomedical Databases

I stumbled across an interview of science blogger Walter Jessen that is full of interesting gems related to this class. I'm going to pick the Shared Names Project to talk about in depth here. The Shared Names Project is attempting to assign URIs for publicly available biomedical database records and publish RDF documentation about those records. In doing this, they hope to make it easier to link data sets and tools across projects. Without shared URIs, it is necessary to do a lot of mapping to get two data sets to link up. The shared URIs will make it so that pieces of a data set can easily be extracted into another.

Each URI will point to an RDF document that is hosted on servers maintained by the project. Within the RDF document, there will be documentation about what the URI denotes (what database it is), links to various versions of the records (XML, ASN, HTML), links to corresponding resources that use the shared naming scheme, links to external resources ("For example, the RDF for PubMed record 15456405 could link out to the iHOP page for the article described by the PubMed record."), and other information that might be useful to humans or computers.

The project has a wiki that discusses the cyberinfrastructure (technical and administrative) issues they're working out. One technical issue I think I teased out from the Use Cases page is that some "records" may be contained in other records (just as an image may be contained inside an article but is still be a resource in itself), so how do you indicate the level of granularity you want? They also discuss what metadata they should provide for each URI. I don't fully understand how one would use these shared names in a practical sense, but I thought it might be worth pointing out since we've talked a bit about (albeit vaguely) about data sets talking to each other. Similar projects mentioned on the Shared Names wiki are MIRIAM and Integr8, though I don't know how this project and those are similar or different.