URL +1, LSID -1

"URL +1, LSID -1" is the name of the current thread on "public-semweb-lifesci":
http://www.mail-archive.com/public-semweb-lifesci@w3.org/index.html#02766
This discussion (worth looking) is about the life science identifier 'LSID) and it was started by Eric Jain:

In the latest release of UniProt (11.3), all URIs of the form:

urn:lsid:uniprot.org:{db}:{id}

have been replaced with URLs:

http://purl.uniprot.org/{db}/{id}

In general, these URLs can be resolved to a human readable web page (a few are still broken, will be fixed). Some of these web pages may (or may not) be linked to a machine-readable representation via link-rel=alternate.

As an optimization for "Semantic Web" crawlers, there is experimental support for "Accept" headers (i.e. set it to "application/rdf+xml").

Some examples:

http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P12345
http://purl.uniprot.org/taxonomy/9606
http://purl.uniprot.org/pdb/1BRC

Among the protagonists we can find Roderic Page, Michel Dumontier, Mark Wilkinson, Alan Ruttenberg, Dany Ayers, etc...

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Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) are persistent, location-independent, resource identifiers for uniquely naming biologically significant resources including species names, concepts, occurrences, genes or proteins, or data objects that encode information about them. To put it simply, LSIDs are a way to identify and locate pieces of biological information on the web.

As far I understand LSID, we all should use lsid:ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:pubmed:12507336 instead of http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=12507336&ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&uid=12507336. (Note that the two later URL are not the same but they point to the same article). An LSID resolver can also be used to find/discover some other (RDF based) properties about your object.

In the thread a firefox extension resolving lSID uri was described: I just installed it on my firefox and it looks nice and the code looks really interesting: it shows how to create a firefox extension which will insert a new handler for a new internet protocol named "lsidres:".


(...)
LsidModule.registerSelf = function (compMgr, location, loaderStr, type){

// http://developer.mozilla.org/xpcom/api/nsIComponentRegistrar/
compMgr = compMgr.QueryInterface(Components.interfaces.nsIComponentRegistrar);
compMgr.registerFactoryLocation(LSIDPROT_HANDLER_CID,
"Protocol handler for LSID",
"@mozilla.org/network/protocol;1?name=lsidres",
location, loaderStr, type);

}
(...)



Then when a hyperlink in a HTML page (such as lsidres:urn:lsid:ubio.org:namebank:11815) is activated, firefox open a new window, calls a remote LSID resolver and displays the properties of your object.

Pierre