They are not XML enabled. We wish they were since both are pretty interesting databases.
Virtually all major relational dbms now output XML, if crude, and there is not really much reason people shouldn't be doing so on some agreed upon alternative http port, say 8883. It's not critical to wait for an agreed upon uniform schema to serve XML. it's even possible to infer a schema or DTD from data instances, and anyway a schema or DTD is not necessary to do much of what XML is good for. We hope people will pay more attention to getting out their "raw" data in XML and publishing their /query/ interfaces so that applications can use them. When we do something like our gateway, we have to put a lot of time into reverse engineering the query syntax because so many sites believe that the only use of their data is through the forms they provide, or some import of their entire dataset by a prior arrangement.
Bob
Jones, Tim (CMR, Hobart) writes:
Date: Tue, 20 Mar 2001 15:29:55 +1100 From: "Jones, Tim (CMR, Hobart)" tim.jones@MARINE.CSIRO.AU To: TDWG-SDD@usobi.org Subject: Re: XML gateways
Nice work!!
I am wondering though, if you are federating heterogenous XML databases why do you need to scrape the returned HTML but instead operate on the XML or are they not XML enabled?
Tim Jones
Database Manager Centre for Research on Introduced Marine Pests GPO Box 1538, Hobart Tas 7000, Australia. Phone : (03) 62325222 (switch), (03) 62325213 (direct) Mobile: 0411 560057 Fax : (03) 62325485 E-mail: tim.jones@marine.csiro.au
-----Original Message----- From: Robert A. (Bob) Morris [mailto:ram@CS.UMB.EDU] Sent: Tuesday, 20 March 2001 15:18 To: TDWG-SDD@USOBI.ORG Subject: XML gateways
Here's some candy: we've built simple sample gateways to the USDA Plants site and the Simthsonian Mammal Species of the World site. Server-side perl makes up cgi requests to the site, parses the returned html and emits XML. Of course, it is a very unstable solution since changes to the site's html will break it. But we did it because we experiment with federating heterogeneous XML biodiversity databases.
You can nibble at http://www.cs.umb.edu/efg/xml/junwan/DEVELOP/gateway/gateway2.html
Bob Morris Jun Wan