Dear all,
There are just two items left on the list of possible changes before submitting TAPIR to the TDWG standards track:
1) Allow custom operations to be declared as part of capabilities.
I would suggest to simply include a new custom slot for this in the schema in case someone needs to use it in the future.
2) Allow dump files to be declared.
This has been discussed some time ago in the TAPIR mailing list but we didn't come to a final conclusion.
Since some networks are starting to harvest data by fetching entire dump files, I think it's important to allow TAPIR services to declare any dump files that may be available. Fetching a dump file from a provider and using incremental harvesting in later interactions with the service will probably be the most efficient approach.
Since TAPIR generates XML output, it makes more sense to me to see dump files in XML. However, Tim/Markus (GBIF) are proposing another format for dump files using tab/csv files together with a metafile. It should be easy to allow both options when declaring a dump file in TAPIR capabilities, but I don't think it's the role of TAPIR to define specific formats. We can probably use something like this to declare dump files:
<archives> <archive format="" location="" outputModel=""/> ... </archives>
Where format could be "xml" or any custom term, and outputModel would be optional (only used with "xml" format). Things like date when the dump file was generated and whether it's gzipped or not could be additional attributes, but in most cases this can be discovered through the protocol used to retrieve the file, so in principle I would not include the attributes.
Please let me know if this is an acceptable solution or if you have any different thoughts. Also let me know if you have any other ideas or suggestions about TAPIR in general. This is the time.
I would like to finally submit specification & schema to the standards track in the beginning of the week.
Best Regards, -- Renato