Wiki for the TAPIR Protocol

Welcome! This Wiki was created for discussing and documenting a unified 2nd generation query protocol to supersede the CurrentProtocols in use within the biodiversity informatics community.

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Introduction

During the 2004 TDWG meeting in Christchurch, NZ, the presented unified protocol was named TAPIR, TDWG Access Protocol for Information Retrieval. It was agreed to start testing the protocol by reimplementing two data provider software, each one carried out by one of the existing network communities, BioCASe and DiGIR.

The previous BioCASe PyWrapper (http://www.pywrapper.org) and PHP DiGIR provider (a new version known as TapirLink) are already fully functional TAPIR providers.

Latest Version

• Latest XML Schema for the protocol
• Specification
• ExampleTapirMessages
• TapirSoftware

Useful links

• TAPIR official website
• TapirMailingList
• FrequentlyAskedQuestions
• RoadMap

Current Wiki Activities

• TapirRdf - using TAPIR providers to serve valid RDF
• MappingConceptualSchemas
• TAPIR and OAI-PMH (TapirOAIPMH)

History about the Integration Process

General Protocol Requirements

• Integrate the CurrentProtocols being used by different networks from the biodiversity informatics community.
• Try to accomodate the needs of other BiodiversityDataStandards.
• Keep the protocol generic so that other communities (not only biodiversity informatics) could use it and possibly collaborate.
• Try to impose minimum impact on SoftwareRelatedToPreviousProtocols.

Preparatory Documentation

• DifferencesBetweenProtocols: Documentation about differences between the CurrentProtocols.
• DifferencesTapirWfs: Documentation about the differences between TAPIR and Web Feature Service (WFS) from OGC

Integration Proposals

• ProposalPresentedInTdwg 2004 as PDF, XML schema
• Older proposals
  • FirstProposal, XQuery based
  • SecondProposal, straightforward approach (schema: http://www.bgbm.org/biodivinf/Schema/protocol2.xsd)
  • ThirdProposal, the same as the second proposal but using SOAP
  • FourthProposal, based on the SecondProposal but incorporating the BerlinMeetingResults
  • FifthProposal, current proposal based on the SecondProposal, FourthProposal and incorporating new suggestions/changes since the BerlinProtocolMeeting
  • LatestProposal

Requested Features

• AdditionalIdeas to be discussed.

Discussion about Output Models

Are models determinate or do they depend upon the providers datasource structure? Is the current model definition sufficient? In particular some potential problems have surfaced during the PyWrapper implementation:

• EmptyRepeatableRegionProblem
• IndexingElementExplosion

To address these issues the following options are being considered:

• SemanticMapping: Use ontologies to do the output model mapping
• DroppingDynamicOutputModels: Restrict providers to offer a set of predefined output models.
• ObjectOrientedApproach: Make TAPIR truly object oriented and serve interlinked, compound objects instead of XML documents. A very different approach which causes a lot of reorganisation of the protocol. Promosing for the future in a time where GUIDs are omnipresent.

Other

• GlossaryOfTerms
• BerlinProtocolMeeting and the BerlinMeetingResults
• Madrid protocol meeting results
• TapirWorkshop2007 (Copenhagen)

Useful Wiki links

• Recent Changes: see where people are currently working.
• Sandbox: feel free to change this page and experiment with editing
• WebSearchAdvanced: search or browse the database in various ways