Software review

LSID Tester, a tool for testing Life Science Identifier resolution services

Roderic DM Page

Division of Environmental and Evolutionary Biology, Institute of Biomedical and Life Sciences, Graham Kerr Building, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

author email corresponding author email

Source Code for Biology and Medicine 2008, 3:2doi:10.1186/1751-0473-3-2

Published:	18 February 2008

Abstract

Background

Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) are persistent, globally unique identifiers for biological objects. The decentralised nature of LSIDs makes them attractive for identifying distributed resources. Data of interest to biodiversity researchers (including specimen records, images, taxonomic names, and DNA sequences) are distributed over many different providers, and this community has adopted LSIDs as the identifier of choice.

Results

LSID Tester is a web application written in PHP. Given a LSID the application performs seven tests, reporting the results at each step. If all tests are successful the metadata associated with the LSID is displayed, and can be viewed in a range of formats.

Conclusion

The software provides a tool for testing a LSID resolution service.