About the LSID Resolution Project
The Life Science Identifier (LSID) specification was originally developed by a small team of developers at IBM to be used to name and located bioinformatics data objects, such as DNA and gene sequences.
That team of developers at IBM also implemented the LSID resolution protocol in various programming languages and provided several documents, tutorials and example programs to demonstrate their use. All code has is freely available as open source at another LSID SourceForge project website.
More recently, the biodiversity information community, led by the Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), adopted the LSID specification to identify data objects, such as scientific names, species occurrences and observations, in their information systems.
Currently GBIF and TDWG are fomenting a number of LSID related projects, including-
- The deployment of various LSID resolvers;
- The development of RDF vocabularies to represent metadata associated with LSIDs (see the TDWG Technical Architecture Group wiki and LSID Vocabularies page)
- The standardization of the use of LSIDs within the biodiversity information community (see the TDWG Globally Unique Identifiers Group wiki)
TDWG and GBIF are now maintaining the LSID related resources, including this website.