[tdwg-tapir] Minor changes

[Markus Döring]

Renato,
as you might have guessed all your proposed changes are fine with me.

Regarding the metadata variables I would make all existing metadata  
values available as TAPIR variables. Maybe we can leave out the  
indexing preferences. This would mean to add dc:subject,  
dct:bibliographicCitation and dct:modified

I am not sure yet how you will retrieve metadata values for  
RelatedEntities though. There might be multiple and do you have a  
simple rule in mind what to do in that case? That's the case for all  
contact data.

cheers
--
Markus



On 15.05.2007, at 16:03, Renato De Giovanni wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Yesterday I finally managed to produce valid ABCD output from an  
> instance
> of TapirLink that has mapped DarwinCore concepts. It could be  
> possible to
> achieve this before by using a simplified XML Schema for ABCD, but I
> wanted to use the official one. The corresponding output model  
> (inside our
> repository under cs/dwc/1.4/models) still needs to include more  
> mappings
> between ABCD and DarwinCore elements, but it already works with the  
> most
> important concepts.
>
> One of the things that I needed to do was to create more environment
> variables to be used by output models, because there are mandatory
> elements in ABCD that don't correspond to any DarwinCore concept.  
> However,
> they do correspond to TAPIR metadata elements.
>
> The current TAPIR specification recognizes the following environment
> variables:
>
> date
> timestamp
> dataSourceName
> accessPoint
> lastUpdated
>
> I created these new ones in TapirLink, not only because of ABCD but  
> also
> for the RSS2 output model:
>
> dateCreated
> metadataLanguage
> dataSourceLanguage
> dataSourceDescription
> rights
> technicalContactName
> technicalContactEmail
> contentContactName
> contentContactEmail
>
> If the specification doesn't include these variables, they will remain
> unofficial and this situation may not be good for future  
> interoperability.
> So one of the things I would like to suggest is to include these  
> variables
> in the controlled vocabulary defined by TAPIR.
>
> Please let me know if this is OK and if you have more suggestions.
> (Markus, sometime ago there was the idea of including all TAPIR  
> metadata
> as environment variables so that they could also be returned in search
> responses, would you like to suggest more variables?).
>
> Remember that TAPIR environment variables are optional (providers  
> don't
> need to support them) and extensible (providers can define new  
> variables
> if they want to).
>
> Here are two other minor changes suggested to the protocol and  
> raised by
> issues that were found during the development of TAPIR tools for  
> the GISIN
> network:
>
> * Restrict POST requests to "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" (the
> default POST encoding). Reason: TAPIR requests can include multiple
> parameters with the same name ("concept" and "tagname" in the  
> inventory
> operation) but some languages like PHP cannot handle this properly  
> - only
> the last parameter becomes available from the $_REQUEST global  
> variable.
> In these cases it is necessary to manually extract the parameters  
> and this
> doesn't seem to be an easy task if POST is used with
> "multipart/form-data". Since this last encoding is mostly used for  
> sending
> large quantities of binary data, which is definitely not the case of a
> TAPIR request, I think we can safely avoid it.
>
> * Include an optional attribute "alias" in output models and query
> templates that are advertised in capabilities responses. The CNS
> configuration file already allows aliases for output models and query
> templates, but these are not present in capabilities responses as it
> happens with concept and schema aliases.
>
> Please let me know if you have any comments, suggestions or  
> objections to
> these changes, otherwise I'll take the liberty to make them in the  
> next
> few days.
>
> Best Regards,
> --
> Renato
>
>
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