I agree that there are many good reasons for protocols such as TAPIR that go beyond the need for harvesting information. Using DiGIR/BioCASe/TAPIR to map a relational database to a common form such as DwC or ABCD can serve as the basis for simple mapping of these same data for BioMOBY, WFS and other web services and search interfaces. This is the basic approach that IPGRI is following to bridge between their own network of data resources and toolkits for molecular analysis, etc. TAPIR providers can serve as general-purpose query tools which can be used to standardise underlying data models to a common form. It is then simple to map other services against the common form rather than against all the varying underlying data models.
Donald
--------------------------------------------------------------- Donald Hobern (dhobern@gbif.org) Programme Officer for Data Access and Database Interoperability Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark Tel: +45-35321483 Mobile: +45-28751483 Fax: +45-35321480 ---------------------------------------------------------------
-----Original Message----- From: Tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:Tdwg-tag-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Javier de la Torre Sent: 06 March 2006 11:14 To: =?ISO-8859-1?Q? D=F6ring; _Markus ?= Cc: Bob Morris; Guentsch, Anton; Tdwg-tag@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [Tdwg-tag] Why should data providers supply search and queryservices?
Hi,
There are many reason why I think data providers should be more capable than just simple interfaces to indexers. Some of them have been already pointed by Markus and Bob, but I would like to use to a non-technical reason and very related to what TDWG is good for.
While making the biological collection databases available for GBIF indexing I think we are also helping them in their daily work. Some databases are setting up their own web interface based on BioCASe, there are projects to help them geoloreference their specimens based on the provider software, they have the possibility to export their collection database and import it into another collection management software, and many other useful possibilities that will hopefully appear in the next years. These solutions are possible because the software installed on their servers is capable of doing searches and queries. So here my argument is that: by setting up a query level and installing a capable software on the providers directly we are improving these databases.
I have used this argument for a while already when convincing data providers: by joining GBIF they are not just only making their data available to the community but that they will also benefit of the tools that are appearing for them based on TDWG standards. I think it is a good deal, make your data available and we will help you to improve it with standard tools from the community for no cost.
There is also many people who do not want to share their data, specially researches, and that can also benefit from our software and standards without having to participate in any network. If we create good and useful software they might consider using it to handle their data and at some point maybe open it to the public.
This is also somehow related to what I call the OAI "model" versus the OGC "model". The OAI is helping and promoting the accessibility to data in distributed databases while the OGC is an organism just promoting the interoperability of applications. While the OAI is focus on making the accessibility to the data as good as possible (to set up value-added services on top of cache databases) the OGC community is working on making software interoperable, extensible and open to new uses that they might not know now.
I want to think that GBIF is like the OAI and that instead of creating their own technology to achieve their goals is using TDWG. I tend to think of TDWG more like OGC in the other hand. So, GBIF is just one user of TDWG work.
So my vote goes for more sophisticated data providers that allow us to construct more things on top of them without having to consider GBIF at all. TAPIR looks fine to me for this task, even more if complemented with the TAPIR "Lite" idea for providers that just want to contribute to GBIF.
Best regards,
Javier.
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