OAI-PMH Harvesting at GBIF
GBIF has been my first experience in the bio-informatics world; my first assignment was developing an OAI-PMH harvester. This post will introduce OAI-PMH protocol and how we are gathering XML documents from different sources, in a next post I'll give a introduction to the Index that we have built using those documents.
The main goal for this project was develop the infrastructure needed across the GBIF network to support the management and delivery of metadata that will enable potential end users to discover which datasets are available, and, to evaluate the appropriateness of such datasets for particular purposes. In the GBIF context, resources are datasets, loosely defined as collections of related data, the granularity of which is determined by the data custodian/provider.
OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) is a platform independent framework for metadata publishers and metadata consumers as well. The most important concepts of this protocol...