One man's search is another man's inventory! I was thinking that the actual objects returned by these requests are quite small so there is no point in returning anything smaller. A call to GetTNamesMatching() passing a modified_after date of a very long time ago and paging parameters would effectively crawl over the whole resource. I need to expand on the modification date thing - probably in a few days. getNamesByRank() would be GetTNamesMatching(rank_code=gen) or something along those lines. Rank codes would be limited to those in TCS anyhow so you could crawl over the whole data source this way if you wanted. Obviously some would return empty results. I need to expand on the parameter things. Does this solve inventory problems? GBIFDataPortal.GetAllOccurrenceRecords() might be popular with the compulsive data hoarders! Roger Donald Hobern wrote:

Inventory requests can allow us to escape from the problem Roger describes on the Wiki of being unable to discover all data from a nomenclatural provider (and the need to enforce a single root element for concepts). Indexing IPNI for example would be very difficult without an inventory request of some kind.

There are clearly various ways of doing this. One could be to include a message in the API getNamesByRank() (and perhaps another getIncludedRanks()). Something like this might be less stress on a large resource than getNamesInventory().

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-tapir-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tapir-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of "Döring, Markus" Sent: 29 November 2005 10:40 To: tdwg-tapir@lists.tdwg.org Subject: Re: [tdwg-tapir] TaxonAPI

So inventories dont seem to be important for any of the taxon APIs. Do we then still want to provide parameterised inventories?

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von: tdwg-tapir-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-tapir-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] Im Auftrag von Dave Vieglais Gesendet: Montag, 28. November 2005 18:40 An: roger@tdwg.org Cc: tdwg-tapir@lists.tdwg.org Betreff: Re: [tdwg-tapir] TaxonAPI

Hi Roger,

You might also like to examine

http://seek.ecoinformatics.org/Wiki.jsp?page=TOSAPISignatures

The interfaces and implementation have been developed as part of the SEEK project.

regards, Dave V.

Roger Hyam wrote:

...

Hi Everyone,

I have been doing some work on a TaxonAPI. This is a high/low definition of the kind of thing I believe people publishing taxonomic data need to produce and people consuming it need to eat based on the work I have been involved in on TCS.

It is framed as if it were a web service type of thing but I imagine that each of the method calls mentioned could equate to a Tapir template of some kind. I imagine a template containing a parameterized filter (not sure if those exist anymore).

This is still work in progress as I need to define the list of parameters more closely and sort the greater than/less than issue for dates and a few other bits. Plus no one has seen it to comment on!

You can read more about it here:

http://www.tdwg.hyam.net/twiki/bin/view/TIP/TaxonAPI

I would be most grateful for your comments.

How does this fit with Tapir?

Roger

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