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BCI - Shared GUID Services

Note: This service will be available in August 2008. Until then this page should be treated as provisional.

The single most important thing a collection curator or researcher can do to improve the quality of shared data is to tag their specimens with Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs). There have been several international meetings organised by TDWG and others to discuss what form these GUIDs should take and a decision was taken to use LSIDs

The adoption of LSIDs has not been rapid. Although an LSID Authority can be implemented quite simply the technical hurdles are high enough to prevent most collection managers implementing LSID Authorities. The most notable problem is the need to have special DNS entries for the hosts domain.

Many, if not all, of the technical hurdles involved in implementing LSIDs for the specimens in a collection can be overcome by sharing a single LSID Authority. BCI has already had to implement an LSID authority for collections and it is relatively little effort to share that authority with others. BCI is therefore offering a service to collection curators under the title BCI Shared GUID Services (BCI-SGS).

How It Works

There are five parts to an LSID such as this one for New York Botanic Garden - urn:lsid:biocol.org:col:15556. They are separated by colons. The first two, urn:lsid, just indicate that it is an LSID. The third, biocol.org, indicates the location of the authority for that LSID (i.e. who will provide information about the resource identified by that LSID). The fourth, col, is a 'namespace' within that authority and the fifth, 15556, is the id of the thing within that namespace.

BCI uses the single namespace 'col' to indicated collections and a simple integer to indicated a particular entry within the index. Through BCI-SGS we are offering to host different namespaces for different collection's specimens.

A simple example: If the curator of the "Big Blue Bottle Reference Collection" wanted to use the BCI shared LSID authority they would be given a namespace such as 'bbbrc'. They would then use LSIDs that looked like this "urn:lsid:biocol.org:bbbrc:1234" where 1234 is their internal catalogue number for a specimen. BCI would provide the infrastructure to make sure the LSIDs resolved correctly.

Prerequisites

As a collection curator you must:

• Have numbers or codes that uniquely identify specimens (or possibly lots) within the scope of your collection. Catalogue numbers or barcodes are often used.
• Expose information about these specimens on the web where one web page URL corresponds with one of your internal IDs.

Technically How it Works

• When presented with an LSID with a namespace of 'col' BCI treats it locally - it is an LSID of a collection
• When presented with an LSID with another namespace that it knows about, BCI looks up an associated URL to the institutions server, appends the ID part of the LSID to that URL and does an HTTP HEAD call on it.
• If it gets back a HTTP 200 response then it returns a data services wsdl, with that URL embedded in it, to the client.
• If it gets a 404 Not Found it returns an LSID 201 Unknown.
• If it gets anything else it returns LSID 500 INTERNAL_PROCESSING_ERROR and a note to say it can't determine if the LSID exists or not.
• Non recognized namespaces get a LSID Unknown of course.

The BCI proxy would work with the proxied versions of LSIDs returning a 303 as per W3C recommendations.

This would mean that any collection that could put up a page of RDF for each specimen could issue LSIDs without messing with authority software or DNS. They also automatically get a W3C httprange-14 compliant PURL-like redirect.

Using the SGS

If you are interested in using the BCI-SGS please contact admin@BiodiversityCollectionsIndex.org and we will assess your situation.