Warning
This repository has been archived and is no longer maintained.
The code is provided for historical reference and may contain unpatched or unknown vulnerabilities.
It should not be used in production systems.
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).