What is an LSID:

LSID's were designed to be a globally-recognized short identifiers for a complex entities that are both computer and human readable.

Why LSID's are in Metacat:

We chose to incorporate LSID's in metacat so as to support a globally accepted standard for identifying biological entities instead of using a proprietary scheme. By doing this we have exposed data and metadata stored in Metacat through a variety of LSID clients. Additionally, the LSID support in Metacat has been implemented as a series Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) interfaces with the intent of providing an easily modifiable system.

What you get with Metacat's LSID Support:

By enabling the Metacat LSID support you will be able to use the LSID clients and notation to query Metacat for data and metadata. An example of an LSID client is the LSID Launchpad. Furthermore, one can use the LSID notation directly in the Metacat http query to access data and metadata within a Metacat. For example, a document (tao.12039.1) stored in a Metacat available at: http://qtz.homelinux.com:9999 can be accessed by the following http Metacat queries:

http://qtz.homelinux.com:9999/authority/data?lsid=urn:lsid:sulphur.ecoinformatics.org:tao:12039:1

http://qtz.homelinux.com:9999/authority/metadata?lsid=urn:lsid:sulphur.ecoinformatics.org:tao:12039:1

The first query returns the data associated with that document and the second query returns the metadata. Notice that the periods in the Metacat document ID have been replaced with colons. Also notice the host urn attribute (urn:lsid:sulphur.ecoinformatics.org), this host needs to be set as a SRV record as DNS entry on the DNS server for ecoinformatics.org. To use LSID support in Metacat the Metacat administrator does need to have access to the DNS server for the domain hosting the Metacat so that he/she can modify the SRV record(s). The Metacat build.proprties LSID attributes for the above example are:

authority.context=authority

config.lsidauthority=sulphur.ecoinformatics.org

** the SRV record for sulphur.ecoinformatics.org points to qtz.homelinux.com on port 9999

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