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<pre wrap="">This is a little more of a controversial question that has been suggested:
"Why should data providers supply search and query services?"
</pre>
<ul>
<li>We have many potential data providers (potentially every
collection and institution).</li>
<li>We have many potential data consumers (potentially every
researcher with a laptop).</li>
<li>We have a few potential data indexers (GBIF, ORBIS , etc + others
to come).</li>
</ul>
<pre wrap="">The implementation burden should therefore be:
</pre>
<ul>
<li>Light for the providers - who's role is to conserve data and
physical objects.</li>
<li>Light for the consumer - who's role is to do research not mess
with data handling.<br>
</li>
<li>Heavy for the indexers - who's core business is making the data
accessible.</li>
</ul>
Data providers should give the objects they curate GUIDs. This is
important because it stamps their ownership (and responsibility) on
that piece of data. They then need to run an LSID service that serves
the
(meta)data for the objects they own. <b>There work should stop at this
point!</b>
They should not have to implement search and query services. They
should not anticipate what people will require by way of data access -
that is a separate function.<br>
<br>
Data consumers should be able to access indexing services that pool
information from multiple data providers. They should not have to run
federated queries across multiple data providers or have to discover
providers as this is complex and
difficult (though they may want to browse round data providers like
they would browse links on web pages). Once they have retrieved the
GUIDs of the objects they are interested
in from the indexers they may want to call the data providers for more
detailed information.<br>
<br>
Data indexers should crawl the data exposed by the providers and index
them in thematic ways. e.g. provide geographic or taxon focused
services. This is a complex job as it involves doing clever, innovative
things with data and optimization of searches etc.<br>
<br>
Currently we are trying to make every data provider support searching
and querying when the consumers aren't really interested in querying or
searching individual providers - they want to search thematically
across
providers.<br>
<br>
If a big data provider wants to provide search and query then
they can set themselves up as both a provider and an
indexer - which is more or less what everyone is forced to do now - but
the functions are separate.<br>
<br>
Data providers would have to implement a little more than just an LSID
resolver services for this to work. They would need to provide a single
web service
method (URL call) that allowed indexers to get lists of LSIDs they hold
that have had their (meta)data modified since a certain date but this
would be a relatively simple thing compared with providing arbitrary
query facilities.<br>
<br>
I believe (though I haven't done a thorough analysis of log data ) that
this is more or less the situation now. Data providers implement
complete DiGIR or BioCASE protocols but are only queried in a limited
way by portal engines. Consumers go directly to portals for their data
discovery. So why implement full search and query at the data provider
nodes of the network (possibly the hardest thing we have to do) when it
may not be used?<br>
<br>
This may be controversial. What do you think?<br>
<br>
Roger<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
-------------------------------------
Roger Hyam
Technical Architect
Taxonomic Databases Working Group
-------------------------------------
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.tdwg.org">http://www.tdwg.org</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:roger@tdwg.org">roger@tdwg.org</a>
+44 1578 722782
-------------------------------------
</pre>
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