Identifying and relating biological concepts in the Catalogue of Life

We describe how we are using Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) as globally unique identifiers in the Catalogue of Life, explaining how the mapping to species concepts is performed, how concepts are associated with specific editions of the catalogue, and how the Taxon Concept Schema has been adopted in order to express information about concepts and their relationships. We explore the implications of using globally unique identifiers in order to refer to abstract concepts such as species, which incorporate at least a measure of subjectivity in their definition, in contrast with the more traditional use of such identifiers to refer to more tangible entities, events, documents, observations, etc.A major reason for adopting identifiers such as LSIDs is to facilitate data integration. We have demonstrated the incorporation of LSIDs into the Catalogue of Life, in a manner consistent with the biodiversity informatics community's conventions for LSID use. The Catalogue of Life is therefore available as a taxonomy of organisms for use within various disciplines, including biomedical research, by software written with an awareness of these conventions.As in many areas of scientific research, there is an ever-increasing need to be able to access species-related information reliably, and to be sure that various researchers are either referring to the same entity or that they know they are not. This is particularly important to the biodiversity informatics community where they are frequently using terms and scientific names which have to be understood within the context where they appear. It is not necessarily always appreciated that this issue extends beyond biodiversity informatics to other areas in which species names are used, such as bioinformatics, biomedical informatics and ecoinformatics. The use of Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) can help address this problem electronically. In this paper we explain how GUIDs - and, in particular, Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) [1]