Life Science Identifiers are a way to name and locate pieces of information on the web. Essentially, an LSID is a unique identifier for some data, and the LSID protocol specifies a standard way to locate the data (as well as a standard way of describing that data). They are a little like DOIs used by many publishers. An LSID is represented as a uniform resource name (URN) with the following format: * urn:lsid:::[:] The lsid: namespace, however, is not registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and so these are not strictly URNs or URIs.