From the homepage:
Persistent identification for life science data
The MIRIAM Registry provides a set of online services for the generation of unique and perennial identifiers, in the form of URIs. It provides the core data which is used by the Identifiers.org resolver.
The core of the Registry is a catalogue of data collections (corresponding to controlled vocabularies or databases), their URIs and the corresponding physical URLs or resources. Access to this data is made available via exports (XML) and Web Services (SOAP).
And from the FAQ:
What is MIRIAM, and what does it stand for?
MIRIAM is an acronym for the Minimal Information Required In the Annotation of Models. It is important to distinguish between the MIRIAM Guidelines, and the MIRIAM Registry. Both being part of the wider BioModels.net initiative.
What are the ‘MIRIAM Guidelines’?
The MIRIAM Guidelines are an effort to standardise upon the essential, minimal set of information that is sufficient to annotate a model in such a way as to enable its reuse. This includes a means to identify the model itself, the components of which it is composed, and formalises a means by which unambiguous annotation of components should be encoded. This is essential to allow collaborative working by different groups which may not be spatially co-located, and facilitates model sharing and reuse by the general modelling community. The goal of the project, initiated by the BioModels.net effort, was to produce a set of guidelines suitable for model annotation. These guidelines can be implemented in any structured format used to encode computational models, for example SBML, CellML, or NeuroML . MIRIAM is a member of the MIBBI family of community-developed ‘minimum information’ reporting guidelines for the biosciences.
More information on the requirements to achieve MIRIAM Guideline compliance is available on the MIRIAM Guidelines page.
What is the MIRIAM Registry?
The MIRIAM Registry provides the necessary information for the generation and resolving of unique and perennial identifiers for life science data. Those identifiers are of the URI form and make use of Identifiers.org for providing access to the identified data records on the Web. Examples of such identifiers: http://identifiers.org/pubmed/22140103, http://identifiers.org/uniprot/P01308, …
More identifiers for the life sciences, for those who choose to use them.
The curation may be helpful in terms of mappings to other identifiers.