Sally, I don't think it's a problem. GBIF/DIGIR currently enables providers to limit the size of query responses. It's not impolite to impose limits on a public query interface. Without a limit, your provider service could become overloaded and inaccessible to everyone. So making tradeoffs like this should be understandable and acceptable to all.
The fallback for the query user would be to contact the provider directly and make a special request. Making the provider contact information more visible might help in enabling a fallback for this tradeoff.
Chuck
-----Original Message----- From: Sally Hinchcliffe [mailto:S.Hinchcliffe@kew.org] Sent: Thursday, June 15, 2006 6:08 AM To: tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: [Tdwg-guid] Throttling searches
Hi all another question that has come up here.
As discussed at the meeting, we're thinking of providing a complete download of all IPNI LSIDs plus a label (name and author, probably) which will be available as an annually produced download
Most people will play nice and just resolve one or two LSIDs as required, but by providing a complete list, we're making it very easy for someone to write a crawler that hits every LSID in turn and basically brings our server to its knees
Anybody know of a good way of enforcing more polite behaviour? We can make the download only available under a data supply agreement that includes a clause limiting hit rates, or we could limit by IP address (but this would ultimately block out services like Rod's simple resolver). I beleive Google's spell checker uses a key which has to be passed in as part of the query - obviously we can't do that with LSIDs
Any thoughts? Anyone think this is a problem?
Sally *** Sally Hinchcliffe *** Computer section, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew *** tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5708 *** S.Hinchcliffe@rbgkew.org.uk
_______________________________________________ TDWG-GUID mailing list TDWG-GUID@mailman.nhm.ku.edu http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-guid