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Life Science Identifiers^[1][2] are a 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 has been a lot of interest in LSIDs in both the bioinformatics and the biodiversity communities. However, more recently, as understanding has increased of how HTTP URIs can perform a similar naming task,^[3][4] the use of LSIDs as identifiers has been criticized^[5] as violating the Web Architecture good practice of reusing existing URI schemes,^[6] and interest in LSIDs has waned in favor of HTTP URIs.

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 were thought to exist, one of which was the inability to programmatically identify locally named objects that may be widely distributed over the network. This perceived shortcoming would have limited 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) were designed to provide simple and elegant solutions to this problem, consistent with next-generation semantic web and semantic grid, based on the extension of existing internet technologies. However, it has more recently been pointed out that these perceived shortcomings are not intrinsic to HTTP URIs, and essentially the same functionality that LSIDs provide can be obtained using properly crafted HTTP URIs.^[3]

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

• URN:LSID::::

• Resource Description Framework
• MicroArray and Gene Expression

http://lsid.biopathways.org/

http://lsid.biopathways.org/lsid_browser/

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-lsidbp/

1. ^ Clark T., Martin S., Liefeld T. Briefings in Bioinformatics 5.1:59-70, March 1, 2004.
2. ^ OMG Life Sciences Identifiers Specification (LSID)
3. ^ ^{a b} Booth, David: "Converting New URI Schemes or URN Sub-Schemes to HTTP"
4. ^ Thompson, Henry S.: "A precedent suggesting a compromise for the SWHCLS IG Best Practices", publicly archived email message
5. ^ Mendelsohn, Noah: "My conversation with Sean Martin about LSIDs", public email to W3C TAG mailing list 25-Jul-2006
6. ^ W3C Architecture of the World Wide Web

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