An LSID Authority in < 20 lines of PHP?

[Roger Hyam]

Hi All,

Apologies for cross posting on this. The motivation for this message
comes out of the TDWG-GUID Project but detailed discussion is probably
more appropriate to the lsid-developer list so I am posting to both and
ask you to keep techie responses to the developer list and TDWG specific
responses to the TDWG-GUID list.

I was looking at the LSID specification and thinking about how simply I
could implement an LSID Authority that just supported the HTTP GET
bindings. The results of this were about 20 or so lines of PHP code - so
the answer is very simply indeed. This falls into the
programming-for-fun category of development!

The implications for the TDWG side of this is that there should really
be no technical barrier to setting up an LSID Authority at all. It is
only necessary to write some very simple web applications indeed. No
more complex than simple web form processing code. This is something
many data providers already have the ability to do. The caveat to this
is that the developer community may find this is not a feasible
approach....hence this post going to the developer list.

Point your copy of Launchpad at:

lsidres:urn:lsid:hyam.tdwg.gbif.org:apples:4399

(If this doesn't work then we are still having the DNS problems near you
(they should be sorted soon). You could try
lsidres:urn:lsid:biodiv.hyam.net:apples:4399 which will work slowly as
Launchpad needs to time out on each call before calling the
biodiv.hyam.net server directly. If you add the authority
biodiv.hyam.net => http://biodiv.hyam.net/authority/ then it should
rocket along.)

You can read more about the Authority here:

http://biodiv.hyam.net/authority/readme.html

You can download all the code and docs here:

http://biodiv.hyam.net/authority/authority.zip

This is fun code to get people started so have fun playing ...

All the best,

Roger


--

-------------------------------------
 Roger Hyam
 Technical Architect
 Taxonomic Databases Working Group
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 http://www.tdwg.org
 roger at tdwg.org
 +44 1578 722782
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