Thanks, Markus.

That helps add more to the ontology of data exchange. But, you also added another term - wrapper. So, we have services, wrappers, protocols, providers and portals. Still confusing to most I'm afraid.

My general request is for "someone" to produce a single document that organizes it all into a form understandable by the non-programmers.

Also, does BioCASE use UDDI for discovery of the provider metadata and the data elements available from the provider/wrapper?

Chuck

-----Original Message----- From: "Döring, Markus" [mailto:m.doering@BGBM.org] Sent: Friday, January 13, 2006 4:27 AM To: Chuck.Miller@mobot.org; tdwg-tapir@lists.tdwg.org Cc: Berendsohn, Walter G. Subject: AW: [tdwg-tapir] FAQ page

Chuck, from the BioCASE side I can add the following:

BioCASE ------- BioCASE is a European project and its also the name of the protocol (sometimes written as BioCASe). The BioCASE portal (software) is referred to simply as the BioCASE portal. The core of the BioCASE provider software (BPS) is called PyWrapper. This wrapper understands the BioCASE protocol, but also the Species2000/SPICE protocol. So you can use it to serve data in ABCD, SPICE/Species2000, DarwinCore, MCPDH, NaturalCollectionMetadata (NCD) or nearly any other XML standard with some limitations (unfortunately used by SDD).

TAPIR ------ TAPIR refers only to the protocol. The primary goal of TAPIR is the unification of DiGIR and BioCASE, thus replacing them so that data providers and clients can access our data in the same way. There is a full TAPIR provider software available based on the PyWrapper which is called TAPIR PyWrapper. There is no TAPIR portal yet or any other client application for TAPIR.

RDF ---- In many discussions currently RDF is considered a better way to share our data. To fully go the RDF way we would have to migrate the TDWG XML schema standards to some sort of RDF schema or ontology. There is still a performance problem with RDF if used with millions of records (equivalent to maybe hundreds of millions of rdf statements). So I dont see RDF being used right now in full production, but its surely a promising way to go.

Personally I am a bit concerned we are about to split the community again - this time into TAPIR and RDF; but maybe thats how technological progress is made...

regards, Markus

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: tdwg-tapir-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tapir-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] Im Auftrag von Dave Vieglais Gesendet: Freitag, 13. Januar 2006 16:03 An: Javier privat Cc: tdwg-tapir@lists.tdwg.org Betreff: Re: [tdwg-tapir] FAQ page

Much of the confusion has come about I guess because DiGIR 2 is actually a code name for a project that is building a data service application that supports pluggable protocols. There is no official name for that application, and there is no release (yet).

So to try and help things a little:

DiGIR 2 is a data server application, not a protocol. The application supports multiple protocols for accessing the data it serves including:

* DiGIR 1.5 (i.e. the current version of DiGIR) * TAPIR (may not be a full implementation) * WFS (OGC Web Feature Service) * possibly SPARQL (an RDF query language)

DiGIR 2 data server is being developed because we do not yet feel that there is a single unifying protocol for our community, and that new protocols may emerge and then different versions of the protocols will be developed. Having a single data service application that supports pluggable protocols will, we hope, significantly reduce the maintenance and configuration overhead of those interested in serving their data, since one the application is installed, we expect it to be a relatively trivial matter to add protocols or updates to existing protocols.

We will provide more information about the project as updates become available.

regards, Dave Vieglais

Javier de la Torre said the following on 1/12/2006 8:23 AM:

Dear all,

We had today the GBIF ICT Expert Group meeting and a lot of people where making questions about TAPIR. Seems that there is confusion regarding names. People were asking why there is Digir 2 if we are all going to TAPIR and things like that. There were also questions regarding when things are gonna be ready, what can we expect from Digir2 and TAPIR pywrapper and what would be the reasons to migrate, how difficult is going to be to migrate, etc.

I was thinking of extending the FAQ page that Renato started in Madrid to answer all these questions, but I need some help specially from the Digir2 people.

-What is the status of Digir2? -Is it going to be difficult to update from Digir 1 to 2?

I will in any case start writing there and maybe you can then modify extend thins related to you.

Best regards,

Javi.

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