Dear Roger
We have the end-points for our DiGIR and BioCASE providers from the Royal Museum For Central Africa available here : http://193.190.223.48/
We usually never connect our collection management database directly to GBIF or other networks.This is only available in the Intranet. The data for the internet (websites or networks) are copies that have been approved to be ready to be shown to the public by the curators.
For our DiGIR and BioCASE for updates it is done as a full new copie replacing the previous one, with all necessary back-ups to avoid losses. These exports have been automated and we are currently working on enhancing this.
The data of our amphibian data are hosted on virtual servers (using VMware), configured with the requirments needed to be accessible for GBIF or other networks so it does not disturbed the other services of our museum and we have all freedom to adapt it best to our needs.
As we collaborate to several project; the export is on the virtual server in a PostgreSQL database. We have produces SQL views (in this case one for DarwinCore and a another one for ABCD) and we use these "virtual tables" to map our fields against the schemas
This works fine and avoids to have too many copies of your data for different purposes. in case of changes we just need to change the script of the view.
One drawback is that sometimes the visual interfaces of some of the providers cannot see the fields of the fields of a virtual table and you have to do the mappings directly using the config files.
We were also told that if the views get too complicated to execute it may slow down the response time. We have not so complicated views so far to experience this and if it is possible to avoid it by caching the created virtual tables and not to have to execute the script each time if it prooved too slow.
Hope this can help by showing you an way to do it that may not technically be the best solution but managed to respect eventual security issues, respect our museums ICT requirments and not to disturbe other already running services.
If you wish more detailed information on how we did it with examples of scripts or so, let us know.
Best regards
Pat
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