[tdwg-tapir] openModeller querying TAPIR providers

[Renato De Giovanni]

Dear all,

I should also say that I already used these new tools (TAPIR 
builders) when I was writing a new openModeller driver to read 
species occurrence data from TAPIR/DarwinCore providers. If anyone is 
interested in this kind of development (deciding about how to 
interact with TAPIR providers) these are the steps that I followed:

1) Create a response structure to define how search results will be 
returned. In this case I used XML Spy to define an XML Schema which 
would be used to produce the easiest XML to be parsed with expat (all 
data returned as XML attributes). This document was made available 
here:

http://openmodeller.cria.org.br/xml/tapir/1.0/rs.xsd

2) Create a TAPIR output model for the response structure. I used the 
output model builder to map all nodes from the response structure to 
DarwinCore concepts. This document was made available here:

http://openmodeller.cria.org.br/xml/tapir/1.0/om.xml

3) Create a TAPIR search template to facilitate interaction with 
TAPIR providers, pre-filter records and allow the existence of 
TAPIRLite providers that can understand the same request. I used the 
search template builder and made the document available here:

http://openmodeller.cria.org.br/xml/tapir/1.0/st_v3.xml

If I need to make any change in these documents, I save them with a 
new name to avoid problems with providers that could be using older 
cached versions based on the document URL.

So now the client (openModeller) just needs to check if the provider 
has the necessary capabilities before sending search requests. I'm 
basically checking if the provider supports the search operation, if 
all needed concepts are mapped, and if it supports "any output model" 
(full TAPIR providers) or if it supports the specific query template 
that I created (TAPIRLite providers).

By the way, this driver is already available in the latest release of 
the openModeller library (yet to be included in a new release of 
openModeller Desktop).

Best Regards,
--
Renato