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