Renato,

Thanks. I am glad you like the stuff I put up. It is just pulling together what a bunch of us have been talking about. The suggestions you make for capabilities seem good. If I understand the what you are saying about the filtering then when interpreting a filter that looked like this:

<and> <like> <concept path="/Dataset/TaxonNames/TaxonName/CanonicalName/Genus"/> <parameter name="GenusName"/> </like> <like> <concept path="/Dataset/TaxonNames/TaxonName/ProviderSpecific/XYZ/Modified"/> <parameter name="ChangedSince" optional="true" /> </like> </and>

and the ChangeSince parameter is not supplied then the second <like> is ignored. If this is correct then it would be fine.

If you guys could thrash out the details of these things at the November meeting that would be great. I'll try and spend a little time exploring the whole TapirLite area over the next couple of weeks (if I get a chance) and add any other thoughts.

Many thanks,

Roger

Renato De Giovanni wrote:

Hi Roger,

No need to be nervous, tapirs are friendly animals... ;-)

I really like the idea of TapirLite. Originally the capibilities response had a specific section to indicate the supported operations. I think we could bring it back, making ping, metadata, and capabilities the only mandatory operations, as suggested. For consistency, perhaps we could make the accepted views subelements of the corresponding operation element. And since dynamic views can actually be represented by the functionality of the search operation, they would become optional.

So for TapirLite implementations, that section could look like:

<operations> <ping/> <metadata/> <capabilities/> <view> <view identifier="http://tdwg.org/tapir/views/a" alias="a"/> <view identifier="http://tdwg.org/tapir/views/b" alias="b"/> </view> </operations>

I also like the idea of only using view ids: GUIDs redirecting to the respective xml definitions. The alias would be the view name used in URLs.

About filtering, I think it's already possible to have an empty section "operators" in the capabilities response. And when a TapirLite provider says it understands a particular view, even if that view contains an XML-encoded filter the provider could hard code the local translation for that filter and not necessarily be able to parse generic filters.

Regarding the new "id-defined" operator, I was thinking if there's another way to achieve the same results. Perhaps by creating an additional attribute in the <parameter> element called "optional". "Optional" could also be optional, and when not specified the parameter would be considered mandatory. An explicit optional="true" combined with the inexistence of the parameter could have the effect of telling the parser to ignore that condition. Just another idea...

Best Regards,

Renato

On 20 Oct 2005 at 11:41, Roger Hyam wrote:

...

Hi Everyone,

I am nervous at being the first to post to this most esteemed list but here goes.

I have just added two pages to the wiki concerning minor changes that could be made to the protocol to make it easier to implement 'Lite' versions of Tapir providers.

http://ww3.bgbm.org/protocolwiki/TapirLite http://ww3.bgbm.org/protocolwiki/SimpleFiltering

Please read and add your support or reservations to the wiki or discuss it here.

All the best,

Roger

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