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<DIV>Hi all</DIV>
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<DIV>I have recently completed a project funded by the TIP (TDWG Infrastructure Project) funded project that has resulted in a Microsoft .NET version of the TAPIR protocol. TAPIR (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval) is a computer protocol designed for discovery, search and retrieval of distributed data over the Internet, see <A href="http://www.tdwg.org/activities/tapir/">http://www.tdwg.org/activities/tapir/</A> for more information.</DIV>
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<DIV>The .NET implementation of the TAPIR protocol provides the following functionality:</DIV>
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<LI>All TAPIR operations (metadata, capabilities, inventory, search and ping).
<LI>KVP and XML request encodings.
<LI>Inventories on any mapped concepts.
<LI>Searches with any output models involving concepts from mapped schemas.
<LI>Response structures with basicSchemaLanguage.
<LI>Multiple resources can be exposed from a single TAPIRDotNET instance.
<LI>A simple client (tapir_client.aspx) for testing.
<LI>OAI-PMH message handling. After mapping the OAI-PMH structure to the data source, OAI-PMH requests can be handled and valid OAI-PMH responses are retuned from the provider. </LI></DIV>
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<DIV>The OAI-PMH message handling was a result of an investigation into the use of the generic, domain independent, protocol, OAI-PMH (<A href="http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html">http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html</A>) over TAPIR. The investigation proved to be an interesting look at integrating similar data harvesting protocols.</DIV>
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<DIV>TapirDotNET is available from <A href="http://sourceforge.net/projects/tapirdotnet/">http://sourceforge.net/projects/tapirdotnet/</A></DIV>
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<DIV>I have also been looking at returning RDF over TAPIR for the herb IMI specimens. I will be presenting this at TDWG next month.</DIV>
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<DIV>Kevin Richards</DIV>
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