January 12, 2004 | At the heart of the LSID is a uniform resource name (URN) that specifies a common way to access life science data through the Web by uniquely identifying data resources. If widely adopted, URNs would help enable interoperability between various informatics applications. A URN contains as many as five elements, including:
urn:lsid:AuthorityID:NamespaceID:ObjectID:RevisionID
LSID Designator: A mandatory preface that notes that the item being identified is a life science-specific resource
Authority Identifier: An Internet domain owned by the organization that assigns an LSID to a resource
Namespace Identifier: The name of the resource (e.g., a database) chosen by the assigning organization
Object Identifier: The unique name of an item (e.g., a gene name or a publication tracking number) as defined within the context of a given database
Revision Identifier: An optional parameter to keep track of different versions of the same item
Examples:
A PubMed article: urn:lsid:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:pubmed:12571434:
The first version of the 1AFT protein in the Protein Data Bank: urn:lsid:pdb.org:1AFT:1
The second version of an entry in GenBank: urn:lsid:ncbi.nlm.nig.gov:GenBank:T48601:2
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