developerWorks: Build an LSID Authority on Linux

“The amount of biological data being created today is
mind-boggling. As a biologist or bioinformaticist, you probably
know of places around the network that provide very useful
resources for your task at hand–but remembering the different ways
to access this information is often a productivity drain. Maybe you
write a few Perl scripts or know someone who will provide you with
some code for this or a procedure for that. At this point, you may
be thinking that coming up with a common way of naming and finding
this data is the only way you will be able to remain a biologist
and not a programmer. Of course, the value of having a common way
to identify data extends beyond bioinformatics, but for this
article we will stay within the life sciences.

“The Life Sciences Identifier (LSID) is an I3C Uniform Resource
Name (URN) specification in progress. You can read more about the
specification at the I3C (see Resources for a link). Conceptually,
LSID is a straightforward approach to naming and identifying data
resources stored in multiple, distributed data stores in a manner
that overcomes the limitations of the naming schemes that are in
use today.

“An LSID resolver is a software system that implements an
agreed-upon LSID resolution protocol in order to allow higher-level
software to locate and access the data uniquely named by any LSID
URN. The ‘server’ side of this resolver solution is called an LSID
authority. The client stacks and an example client, the LSID
LaunchPad, are provided by the LSID Resolution Protocol
Project.

“In this article, you’ll see how to create your own LSID
Authority using the LSID resolver stack for Java…”

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