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Unlock the growth of your biodiversity Semantic Web


Bioguid.info is an attempt to bootstrap the biodiversity Semantic Web by providing resolvable URIs for biological objects, such as publications, taxonomic names, nucleotide sequences, and specimens. These URIs (or "GUIDs") can be resolved by a web browser to display HTML, but under the hood are resolved to RDF (which you can see by viewing the source of the web page you get for a URI).

Resolvable URIs that yield RDF which can be aggregated and queried is the basic vision of the Semantic Web. The vision is compelling, yet biodiversity informatics is some way from achieving it. One major obstacle is the lack of resolvable URIs for biological objects -- which bioguid.info seeks to remedy.

bioguid.info supports DOIs and PubMed identifiers for publications, Handles (presently limited to those served by the AMNH and Ohio State University), GenBank sequences identified by their GI number, and specimens from AntWeb, Field Museum of Natural History, and Royal Ontario Museum. More sources are being added. Links between objects are also being added, the goal being that given, say, a PubMed identifier, you can go to the sequences referenced by that publication, and then to voucher specimens for those sequences.


Resolvable URIs for Biological Objects

In the context of biological informatics, Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) or Resolvable URIs serve as persistent links to digital representations of biological objects, including publications, taxonomic names, nucleotide sequences, and specimens. These URIs function in two ways:

  1. Human-readable HTML rendering: When accessed via a web browser, the URI leads to an informative webpage.
  2. Machine-readable RDF data: Behind the scenes, the URI resolves to Resource Description Framework (RDF), enabling semantic web applications to interpret the data.

Resolvable URIs enhance data integration, citation, and machine interoperability in biological sciences. By leveraging DOIs, taxonomic databases, sequence repositories, and specimen aggregators, researchers ensure accessibility and reproducibility of scientific data.