LSID Software Development

This break-out group identified outstanding issues that need to be addressed regarding LSID software in the short-term.

This work was based on the gap analysis presented on the 2nd day of the GUID2Workshop and on the discussion that followed.

Note: This is one of the break-out group formed during the 3rd day of the GUID2Workshop.

Conclusions and Recommendations

1) Refinement of existing software components

The group must address the outstanding gaps and issues identified in LSID software components during the meeting.

1. LSID Java Toolkit: include libraries (jars) that the toolkit depend on, to ease toolkit setup
2. lsidBrowser for Firefox: improve installation documentation (issue raised by Bob and others)
3. LaunchPad? for Internet Explorer is based on obsolete technology and is not supported anymore.

Resources should not be spent migrating (porting) resolver authority software to other platforms. Ports should be made by interested parties.

2) Reduce barriers to LSID resolution in external tools and clients

The group at GUID2Workshop identified that the use of LSID may impose a barrier to external communities to resolve LSIDs and consume Biodiversity Informatics metadata. That is because LSID, a URN scheme, requires special software for resolution.

The group identified two tasks that, if successful, can lower this barrier:

1. To contact companies and organizations developing semantic web tools and encourage them to include LSID resolution in their tools
2. Identify key semantic web tools (open source) and examine the possibility of development of plugins and providers to enable LSID resolution

One of the outcomes is to evaluate the feasibility of this a task.

3) Group needs to experiment more with development of client software

Not enough prototype clients have been developed so far to evaluate needs and gaps of client LSID software stack.

Categories