The use of LSID's in BioMOBY

Proposal for the use of LSID’s in BioMOBY

Last update Feb 23, 2005.

There are LSID’s to represent all entities defined in the three MOBY Ontologies (Object, Service, and Namespace), as well as all instances of BioMOBY services. One common way to obtain an LSID is from the ‘lsid=’ attributes in the XML responses from MOBY Central. For example, a call to the retrieveNamespaces method might return a block of XML with the following structure:

<Namespaces>
<Namespace
name=’NCBI_gi’
lsid=’urn:lsid:biomoby.org:namespacetype:NCBI_gi:2006-01-01T01-01-01Z’>
<Description><
![CDATA[The namespace representing GenBank GI numbers]]>
</Description>
<contactEmail>markw@illumiae.com</contactEmail>
<authURI>www.biomoby.org</authURI>
</Namespace>
</Namespaces>

In the XML above, the lsid=’ ‘ attribute of the Namespace element contains the LSID for the namespace being described in that block of XML.

The structure of BioMOBY LSID’s is as follows (yyyy-mm-ddThh-mm-ssZ can be interpreted as the date/time that the entity was created, in GMT):

Objects:
urn:lsid:biomoby.org:objectclass:ontology_term:yyyy-mm-ddThh-mm-ssZ


Services:
urn:lsid:biomoby.org:servicetype:ontology_term:yyyy-mm-ddThh-mm-ssZ


Namespaces:
urn:lsid:biomoby.org:namespacetype:ontology_term:yyyy-mm-ddThh-mm-ssZ


Service Instances:
urn:lsid:biomoby.org:serviceinstance:authuri,servicename:yyyy-mm-ddThh-mm-ssZ


The resolution of LSID’s is discussed in a separate document

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