Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) are persistent, location-independent, resource identifiers for uniquely naming biologically significant resources including species names, concepts, occurrences, genes or proteins, or data objects that encode information about them. To put it simply, LSIDs are a way to identify and locate pieces of biological information on the web.

The LSID concept introduces a straightforward approach to naming and identifying data resources stored in multiple, distributed data stores in a manner that overcomes the limitations of naming schemes in use today. Almost every public, internal, or department-level data store today has its own way of naming individual data resources, making integration between different data sources a tedious, never-ending chore for informatics developers and researchers.

By defining a simple, common way to identify and access biologically significant data, whether that data is stored in files, relational databases, in applications, or in internal or public data sources, LSID provides a naming standard underpinning for wide-area science and interoperability.

The Life Sciences Identifier is an Object Management Group (OMG) Final Adopted Specification developed by the Life Sciences Research (LSR).

LSIDs are Universal Resource Names (URN) that conform to the following syntax:

Every LSID consists of up to five parts, each separated by a colon:

1. the Network Identifier (NID), i.e., the "urn:lsid:" label;
2. the Authority Identification, usually the root DNS name of the issuing authority;
3. the Namespace Identification chosen by the issuing authority;
4. the Object Identification unique in that namespace; and
5. an optional Revision Id to represent versioning information.

 

Here are a few examples of LSIDs:

• urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:30000959-2 – A plan scientific name from IPNI
• urn:lsid:ubio.org:namebank:11815 – A scientific name from UBio
• urn:lsid:ubio.org:classificationbank:1164063 – The description of a genus also from UBio
• urn:lsid:indexfungorum.org:Names:213649 – A scientific name of a fungi from Index Fungorum
• urn:lsid:gdb.org:GenomicSegment:GDB132938 – A segment of the human genome from GDB

These LSIDs name and refer to one unchanging data object each. Unlike the familiar URLs of the World-Wide-Web, LSIDs are location independent. This means that a program or a user can be certain, through the use of LSIDs, that what they are dealing with is exactly the same data because an LSID guarantees to persistently and uniquely identify a data object.

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