Hi all
I have recently completed a project funded by the TIP (TDWG Infrastructure Project) funded project that has resulted in a Microsoft .NET version of the TAPIR protocol. TAPIR (TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval) is a computer protocol designed for discovery, search and retrieval of distributed data over the Internet, see http://www.tdwg.org/activities/tapir/ for more information.
The .NET implementation of the TAPIR protocol provides the following functionality: All TAPIR operations (metadata, capabilities, inventory, search and ping). KVP and XML request encodings. Inventories on any mapped concepts. Searches with any output models involving concepts from mapped schemas. Response structures with basicSchemaLanguage. Multiple resources can be exposed from a single TAPIRDotNET instance. A simple client (tapir_client.aspx) for testing. OAI-PMH message handling. After mapping the OAI-PMH structure to the data source, OAI-PMH requests can be handled and valid OAI-PMH responses are retuned from the provider.
The OAI-PMH message handling was a result of an investigation into the use of the generic, domain independent, protocol, OAI-PMH (http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html) over TAPIR. The investigation proved to be an interesting look at integrating similar data harvesting protocols.
TapirDotNET is available from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tapirdotnet/
I have also been looking at returning RDF over TAPIR for the herb IMI specimens. I will be presenting this at TDWG next month.
Kevin Richards