WoRMS has now implemented persistent & resolvable LSIDs for taxa. For more information, click on 'webservices'.

Life Science Identifiers (LSIDs) are persistent, location-independent, resource identifiers for uniquely naming biologically significant resources including species names, concepts, occurrences, genes or proteins, or data objects that encode information about them. To put it simply, LSIDs are a way to identify and locate pieces of biological information on the web.

Link: http://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=webservice