Resolve Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) using a local cache.
LSIDs are a type of globally unique identifier that emerged from the life sciences community. It was adopted by several taxonomic databases in the mid 2000’s. When a LSID is resolved it returns information about the entity identified by that LSID (e.g., a taxonomic name), typically in RDF. For a variety of reasons the adoption of LSIDs has been limited. They are non-trivial to set up, require specialised software to resolve, and return RDF rather than human-readable content. However there are millions of LSIDs “in the wild” and this service aims to make them resolvable by storing the contents of each LSID to disk and providing a simple HTTP interface to resolve that LSID.
I have built up an archive of the XML metadata for millions of LSIDs. A simple approach would be to simply put these millions of files onto a web server, but that number of files can quickly get messy. So I’ve grouped them into sets of up to 1000, gzipped them into archives, and put those on a server. When you request a LSID the service works out which archive has the metadata you want, extracts the metadata from that archive, and sends you the metadata (in the format you requested).
IF includes the following statement:
<PublicationCitation:PublicationCitation rdf:nodeID="bnode0">
In any XML file that has a PublicationCitation. This means every record gets the same bnode for its publication! Need to fix this.