The demise of phthiraptera.org and the perils of using Internet domain names as identifiers

When otherwise sensible technorati refer to "owning" a domain name, it makes me want to stick forks in my eyeballs. We do not "own" domain names. At best, we only lease them and there are manifold ways in which we could lose control of a domain name - through litigation, through forgetfulness, through poverty, through voluntary transfer, etc. Once you don't control a domain name anymore, then you can't control your domain-name-based persistent identifiers either. - Geoffrey Bilder interviewed by Martin Fenner

Geoffery Bilder's comments about the unsuitability of URLs as long term identifiers (as opposed, say, to DOIs) came to mind when I discovered that the domain phthiraptera.org is up for sale:

This domain used to be home to a wealth of resources on lice (order Phthiraptera). I discovered that ownership of the domain had expired when a bunch of links to PDFs returned by an iSpecies search for Collodennyus all bounced to the holding page above. Phthiraptera.org was owned by the late Bob Dalgleish. After his death, ownership of the domain lapsed, and it's now up for sale. Although much of the content of Phthiraptera.org has been moved to phthiraptera.info, URLs containing phthiraptera.org still turn up in search results, especially ones that have been cached (for example, in iSpecies). Given that much of the content is still available the loss isn't total, but anyone relying on links containing phthiraptera.org to point to content (such as a PDF), or to identify that content (such as a publication) will find themselves in trouble. Although ideally Cool URIs don't change, in practice they do, and with alarming frequency. Furthermore, in this case, because ownership of phthiraptera.org has lapsed, there's no opportunity to create redirects from URLs with phthiraptera.org to the equivalent content in phthiraptera.info (leaving aside the issue that phthiraptera.info is not a mirror of phthiraptera.org, so exactly what the redirects would point to is unclear).

Identifiers based on domain names, such as URLs and LSIDs are attractive because the DNS helps ensure global uniqueness, and HTTP provides a way to resolve the identifier, but all this is contingent on the domain itself persisting. For more on this topic I recommend reading Martin Fenner's interview of CrossRef's Geoffrey Bilder, from which I took the opening quote.

Why won't The Plant List won't let me do this?

In my last post I discussed why I thought the decision of The Plant List to use a restrictive license (CC-BY-NC-ND) was such a poor choice. CC-BY-NC-ND states that

You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

To make this point more concrete, I've created this site:

Experiments with The Plant List

to show the kinds of things that The Plant List's choice of license prevents the taxonomic community from doing. As a first step I'm exploring linking the names in the list to the primary scientific literature, as this video demonstrates:

The Plant List from Roderic Page on Vimeo.

For example, we can take a name like Begonia zhengyiana Y.M.Shui, parse the bibliographic citation provided by The Plant List (via IPNI), and locate the actual paper online, in this case it's freely available as a PDF:



Now we can see a drawing of the plant, and instead of simply trusting that the compilers of The Plant List have correctly interpreted this paper, we can see for ourselves. Down the track, we could imagine mining this paper for details about the plant, such as its morphology and geographic distribution. This requires the link to the original literature, which The Plant List lacks.

A good chunk of the recent plant taxonomic literature has DOIs, for example journals such as the Kew Bulletin and Novon. Playing with some scripts I've managed to associate nearly 9000 accepted names with a DOI, and that's by looking at only a few journals. There are lots more DOIs to be found, but because of the way botanical nomenclators record references (see my post Nomenclators + digitised literature = fail) it can be something of a challenge to find them. This task isn't helped by the fairly lax way some publishers enter data in CrossRef (Cambridge University Press I'm looking at you). The other obvious source of digitised literature is, of course, BHL, and that's next on the list of resources to play with.

Experiments with The Plant List is very crude, and I've barely scratched the surface of linking names to primary literature. That said, given that there are exactly zero links between names and digital literature in The Plant List, I'd argue that my site adds value to the data in that The Plant List. And that's my point — by making data available for others to play with, you enable others to add value to that data. By choosing a CC-BY-NC-ND license, The Plant List has killed that possibility.

So, my question for The Plant List is "why did you do that?"