Registry Service Overview

The Registry Service is a core component of the SDL ecosystem responsible for managing unique identities, metadata schemas, and resource relationships.

It supports:

Registration of RDF resources and entities within and across SDL deployments
Generation of globally unique and resolvable IRIs for linked data
Management of type declarations (rdf:type) and shapes for class-based validation
Resolution and introspection of resource metadata

Core Responsibilities

Resource Registration

Track and issue IRIs for scientific entities (samples, datasets, procedures, etc.)
Maintain version history and provenance of registered resources

Schema and Type Management

Map each registered resource to one or more RDF types
Associate SHACL or OWL schemas for validation and inferencing

Identifier Strategies

Human-readable local names
UUID-backed IRIs for long-term persistence
Support for CURIE-based lookup and resolution

Example Registrations

1. Sample Instance

acl:Sample789 a acl:SolidSample ;
  dct:title "Annealed perovskite powder" ;
  dct:identifier "urn:id:5538e2e8-2e57-45a2-8083-2bc3f4bba147" ;
  prov:wasGeneratedBy acl:SynthesisRun456 .

2. Shape Reference for Validation

acl:SolidSampleShape a sh:NodeShape ;
  sh:targetClass acl:SolidSample ;
  sh:property [
    sh:path dct:title ;
    sh:datatype xsd:string ;
    sh:minCount 1
  ] .

Interoperability

The Registry supports cross-deployment federation of resources
It is tightly coupled with the Catalog, Repository, and Storage services
Registered resources are discoverable via SPARQL and RESTful linked data endpoints