[8] Nevertheless, the explicit separation of data from metadata; specification of a method for discovering multiple locations for data-retrieval; and the ability to discover multiple independent sources of metadata for any identified thing were crucial parts of the LSID and its resolution specification that have not successfully been mimicked by an HTTP-only approach.
The World Wide Web provides a globally distributed communication framework that is essential for almost all scientific collaboration, including bioinformatics.
However, several limits and inadequacies were thought to exist, one of which was the inability to programmatically identify locally named objects that may be widely distributed over the network.
This perceived shortcoming would have limited our ability to integrate multiple knowledgebases, each of which gives partial information of a shared domain, as is commonly seen in bioinformatics.
The Life Science Identifier (LSID) and LSID Resolution System (LSRS) were designed to provide simple and elegant solutions to this problem, consistent with next-generation Semantic Web and semantic grid, based on the extension of existing internet technologies.