[tdwg-tapir] Fwd: Tapir protocol - Harvest methods?

Tim Robertson trobertson at gbif.org
Thu May 15 10:04:52 CEST 2008


Locally generated / localised DwC index files?
(if you have rich data behind LSID, then this file is an index that allows
searching of those rich data using DwC fields)

I would like to see the data file accompanied with a compulsory metafile
that details rights, citation, contacts etc are all given.  Whether this
file needs the data generation timestamp I am not so sure either and the
HTTP header approach does sound good.  It means you can do a one time
metafile crafting and then just CRON the dump generation... This would be
for institutions with IT resources - e.g. UK NBN with 20M records.

For Joe Bloggs with a data set, if we included it in the wrapper tools, then
it is easy to rewrite the metafile seemlessly anyway so they don't care.

Cheers,

Tim


-----Original Message-----
From: Roger Hyam [mailto:rogerhyam at mac.com] 
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2008 9:12 AM
To: Markus Döring
Cc: trobertson at gbif.org; tdwg-tapir at lists.tdwg.org
Subject: Re: [tdwg-tapir] Fwd: Tapir protocol - Harvest methods?


I imagine a lot of these CSV files (we need a name for them) will be
generated by an SQL query run on a scheduled task or a cron job. This is
good and pretty easy to automate.

It increases the complexity of the dump process greatly if it also needs to
update a metadata file with the new modified date every time.  
In fact it moves the set up of the process from just being a configuration
job in most RDMS to needing actual scripts to run and change the metadata
files. The structure of the CSV file is constant so the metadata file should
really only be created once when the process is set up.

Could we use the modified / created dates in the HTTP headers for the files
instead. The client just has to call a HEAD to see if the file has changed
and get its size before deciding to download it. (It is amazing what you can
do with good old HTTP).

The only thing that is lost doing it this way is we don't know the number of
rows in the file but we do know it's size in bytes. What we gain is the
ability for non-script-writing system admins to set up the system.

Just a thought,

Roger


On 15 May 2008, at 00:00, Markus Döring wrote:

> I agree with Tim that it would be better to keep this proposal/ 
> specification seperate from TAPIR. Saying that it could still be 
> included in the TAPIR capabilities to indicate this feature. But an 
> important reason to have these file is to get more providers on board.
> So they should also be able to implement this without the TAPIR 
> overhead.
>
> A seperate metafile would certainly hold also the timestamp of the 
> last generation of the file, so keeping that seperate has additional 
> advantages.
>
> Markus
>
>
>
> On 14 May, 2008, at 21:44, trobertson at gbif.org wrote:
>
>> Hi Renato,
>>
>> Do you think this really go under TAPIR spec?
>>
>> Sure we want the wrappers to produce it but it's just a document on a 
>> URL and can be described in such a simple way that loads of other 
>> people could incorporate it without getting into TAPIR specs, nor can 
>> they claim any TAPIR compliance just because they can do a 'select to 
>> outfile'.
>>
>> I would also request that the headers aren't in the data file but the 
>> metafile.  It is way easier to dump a big DB to this 'document 
>> standard'
>> without needing to worry about how to get headers in a 20gig file.
>>
>> Just some more thoughts
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Tim
>>
>>
>>
>>> I agree with Markus about using a simple data format. Relational 
>>> database dumps would require standard database structures or would 
>>> expose specific things that are already encapsulated by abstraction 
>>> layers (conceptual schemas).
>>>
>>> I'm not sure about the best way to represent complex data structures 
>>> like ABCD, but for simpler providers such as TapirLink/Dwc, the idea 
>>> was to create a new script responsible for dumping all mapped 
>>> concepts of a specific data source into a single file. Providers 
>>> could periodically call this script from a cron job to regenerate 
>>> the dump. The first line in the dump file would indicate the concept 
>>> identifiers (GUIDs) associated with each column to make it a generic 
>>> solution (and more compatible with existing applications). Content 
>>> could be tab-delimited and in the end compressed.
>>>
>>> Harvesters could use this "seed" file for the initial data import, 
>>> and then potentially use incremental harvesting to update the cache.
>>> But in
>>> this case it would be necessary to know when the dump file was 
>>> generated.
>>>
>>> To use the existing TAPIR infrastructure, we would also need to know 
>>> which providers support the dump files. Aaron's idea, when he first 
>>> discussed with me, was to use a new custom operation. This makes 
>>> sense to me, but would require a small change in the protocol to add 
>>> a custom slot in the operations section of capabilities responses. 
>>> Curiously, this approach would allow the existence of TAPIR "static 
>>> providers" - the simplest possible category, even simpler than 
>>> TapirLite. They would not support inventories, searches or query 
>>> templates, but would make the dump file available through the new 
>>> custom operation. Metadata, capabilities and ping could be just 
>>> static files served by a very simple script.
>>>
>>> If this approach makes sense, I think these are the points that 
>>> still need to be addressed:
>>>
>>> 1) Decide about how to indicate the timestamp associated with the 
>>> dump file.
>>> 2) Change the TAPIR schema (or figure out another solution to 
>>> advertise the new capability, but always remembering that in the 
>>> TAPIR context a single provider instance can host multiple data 
>>> sources that are usually distinguished by a query parameter in the 
>>> URL, so I'm not sure how a sitemaps approach could be used).
>>> 3) Decide about how to represent complex data such as ABCD (if using 
>>> multiple files, I would suggest to compress them together and serve 
>>> as a single file).
>>> 4) Write a short specification to describe the new custom operation 
>>> and the data format.
>>>
>>> I'm happy to change the schema if there's consensus about this.
>>>
>>> Best Regards,
>>> --
>>> Renato
>>>
>>>
>>>> it would keep the relations, but we dont really want any relational 
>>>> structure to be served up.
>>>> And using sqlite binaries for the dwc star scheme would not be 
>>>> easier to work with than plain text files. they can even be loaded 
>>>> into excel straight away, can be versioned with svn and so on. If 
>>>> there is a geospatial extension file which has the GUID in the 
>>>> first column, applications might grab that directly and not even 
>>>> touch the central core file if they only want location data.
>>>>
>>>> I'd prefer to stick with a csv or tab delimited file.
>>>> The simpler the better. And it also cant get corrupted as easily.
>>>>
>>>> Markus
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On 14 May, 2008, at 15:25, Aaron D. Steele wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> for preserving relational data, we could also just dump tapirlink 
>>>>> resources to an sqlite database file (http://www.sqlite.org), zip 
>>>>> it up, and again make it available via the web service. we use 
>>>>> sqlite internally for many projects, and it's both easy to use and 
>>>>> well supported by jdbc, php, python, etc.
>>>>>
>>>>> would something like this be a useful option?
>>>>>
>>>>> thanks,
>>>>> aaron
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> tdwg-tapir mailing list
>>> tdwg-tapir at lists.tdwg.org
>>> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tapir
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> tdwg-tapir mailing list
>> tdwg-tapir at lists.tdwg.org
>> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tapir
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> tdwg-tapir mailing list
> tdwg-tapir at lists.tdwg.org
> http://lists.tdwg.org/mailman/listinfo/tdwg-tapir






More information about the tdwg-tag mailing list