Abstract: As the quantity and complexity of Life Science data continues to grow, so too does its availability through the web. This can cause potential integration issues where individual record or dataset identification was not conceived for use in a global data landscape. This can manifest in issues such as identifier or namespace collisions, resulting in erroneous integration of data, or simply as “link rot” and “content drift”. As a consequence, there is often a need to provide additional and potentially costly procedures for the source-dependent processing of data, or else the provision of alternative mapping solutions. BioMedBridges, in association with an international community of partners, have begun to determine the common technical bridges required to allow data integration across the biological domain. Based on our experience we describe ten simple rules for best practice in the provision and reuse of identifiers for web-based Life Science data. We further elicit feedback from the community, through the use of an interactive exercise, to determine both their perceived ranking of these rules, and their actual experiences when encountering web-based data.

Presented at COMBINE 2015: http://co.mbine.org/events/COMBINE_2015