Report prepared for the Experts Meeting Towards the Implementation of a Global Invasive Species
Information Network (GISIN), 6-8 April, 2004. Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
Page 93
8/30/2004
GISIN Infrastructure
The group developed a possible
infrastructure diagram for the GISIN that
represented information providers, the
discovery process, the portal or application
where users may query the information, and
the relationships that exist between these
three components. Providers would
advertise their services and content through
registry entries that are then discovered by
portals.
Users can then access/search the content
of each provider via the portal. In order to
achieve this type of structured information
sharing, the breakout group recognized that
methods and tools need to be identified or
developed for information exchange,
authentication, metadata creation,
populating the registry (discovery), and for
serving the information (e.g. through a
portal/application).
Information Exchange
A commitment needs to be made to building
tools for serving both structured and
unstructured data. The group suggested
building a tool that would facilitate the
exchange of unstructured information in a
structured way. They recommended
investigating small tools that can convert
documents (unstructured data) into
Extensible Markup Language (XML)
(structured data) so that they can be read
by portals, and described an example for
handling unstructured information that may
be contained in legacy documents.
Using the example of a fact sheet
developed in 1999 in Portable Document
Format (PDF), the group suggested that a
method could be developed to extract
species names and geographic locations
from that fact sheet, so that the fact sheet's
information is searchable/discoverable.
Providers
Portal/Application
Discovery
Registry
(UDDI)
Providers
Authentication
2. exchange with
authentication
1. sharing
WSDL
DiGIR
•Query Registry: get list of providers and services
•Query Providers
(Expect several portals, but possibly one generic one
from GISIN)
Metadata
Catalog
Cache
Metadata
and Data
Draft GISIN Infrastructure
DIGIR - Distributed Generic
Information Retrieval.
UDDI – Universal Description,
Discover, and Integration.
WSDL – Web Services Description
Language.
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