LSIDs in myGrid

myGrid implements an LSID authority and resolver using the open source IBM Java library available from Sourceforge.

The main advantages of LSIDs are:

1. decouple naming from physical location (essential)
2. versioning (very useful)
3. separate data from metadata (very useful)
4. foreign authorities can add metadata to an LSID in a transparent way (useful)
5. can be retrofitted (useful - advantage over PURLs)
6. metadata is in RDF (useful)

Re their implementation, there was some misunderstanding about the fact that people (including us) assumed that the IBM implementation requires SOAP, but actually one can also use HTTP.

There is a BioRDF wiki page on LSIDs which was set up dusring the lengthy discussions on URIs v LSIDs this summer (2006) on the BioRDF mailing list. On October 3-4 a f2f meeting in Amsterdam continues the discussion (see A Ruttenberg's slides). Another BioRDF wiki page is available and open to contributions.

For TavernaProvenance metadata we use named RDF graphs, so that the metadata we return for an lsid is trivially the RDF graph with that name, but other implementations are possible.

More Links

• LSID Sourceforge Home Page
• IBM tutorial
• Best Practices
• LSID specification
• Foreign Authorities