Applications in clinical and life-science research need to manage information associated with a specimen within an institution as well as across many organizations. For specimen life-cycle tracking, NCI Center for Bioinformatics and Information Technology (CBIIT) has worked with the biorepository and cancer research community to develop a Global Specimen Identifier Service (GSID). GSID can be incorporated by biorepositories involved in multi-site efforts supported by caTissue Suite open source, home-grown, and commercial biospecimen management systems. The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program has evaluated and provided input into this GSID for their use to associate a unique identifier to each specimen and each derivative.
GSID will enable biorepositories to:
- Support the individual researcher by providing a framework for cross referencing a specimen to the specimen's history and other findings on that specimen
- Provide a source of certified globally unique identifier
- Certify externally generated IDs are globally unique
- Maintain relations between GSIDs, such as source to aliquot, or children to multiple parents.
The Global Specimen Identifier (GSID) Service is a NCI Enterprise Service. Global Specimen Identifer (GSID) is defined as the entity that contains a Globally Unique Idenitifer (UUID) and associated attributes that consists of a name value pair. A UUID is defined as a 16 byte identifier that is intended to be globally unique. There are 3 x 10^38 unique identifiers that can be obtained through the service.
It is developed in Java using caGrid, Hibernate, Castor, Apache Commons technologies.
The Global Specimen Identifier is distributed under the BSD 3-Clause License. Please see the NOTICE and LICENSE files for details.
You will find more details about the GSID in the following links:
- [Community Wiki] (https://wiki.nci.nih.gov/x/Z4mHAw)
- [Issue Tracker] (https://bugzilla.wustl.edu/bugzilla/)
- [Code Repository] (https://github.com/NCIP/gsid)
Please join us in further developing and improving Global Specimen Identifier (GSID).