LSID

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Life Science Identifiers are a uniform way to name and locate pieces of information on the web. Essentially, an LSID is a unique identifier for some data, and the LSID protocol specifies a standard way to locate the data (as well as a standard way of describing that data). They are a little like DOIs used by many publishers. There is a lot of interest in LSIDs in both the bioinformatics and the biodiversity communities.

The World Wide Web provides a globally distributed communication framework that is essential for almost all scientific collaboration, including bioinformatics. However, several limits and inadequacies have become apparent, one of which is the inability to programmatically identify locally named objects that may be widely distributed over the network. This shortcoming limits our ability to integrate multiple knowledgebases, each of which gives partial information of a shared domain, as is commonly seen in bioinformatics. The Life Science Identifier (LSID) and LSID Resolution System (LSRS) provide simple and elegant solutions to this problem, based on the extension of existing internet technologies. LSID and LSRS are consistent with next-generation semantic web and semantic grid approaches.

An LSID is represented as a Uniform Resource Name (URN) with the following format.