Over the last few decades, the biodiversity information community has made primary data available for environmental analyses and decision making. Information on a million scientific names is now available through data providers such as the Integrated Taxonomic Information Service (ITIS), Species2000 and the Catalogue of Life (CoL). Almost one hundred million specimen records are provided by Herbaria and Natural History Museums around the world.

To use these data more effectively, clients need mechanisms to: a) refer to authoritative information resources, b) facilitate data integration and c) detect duplicates of the same resource. To achieve these goals, a system of globally unique identifiers (GUIDs) is needed.

The TDWG Infrastructure Project (TIP) established a TDWG Globally Unique Identifiers Task Group (TDWG-GUID) to provide recommendations for use of GUIDs in our domain. The GUID members concluded that the Life Sciences Identifiers (LSIDs) were the most appropriate technology to address current problems.

LSIDs are unique, persistent, location-independent, resource identifiers for biologically significant resources such as species names, concepts, occurrences, genes or proteins. LSIDs identify and locate biological objects via the web and overcome limitations of current naming schemes.

I will provide an overview of Life Science Identifiers and how they solve current problems. I will report on the work performed by the GUID group over the last two years and provide recommendations and a plan on the use of LSIDs in the biodiversity information domain.