Data Publication with IPT

State of Data Publishing

Is DiGIR Legacy?

• No longer in development

• Incompatible with newer versions of PHP

• Network portals and providers still using

Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT)

• An open source Java web application used to connect and serve 3 types of biodiversity data;

Primary occurrence (distribution of organisms) Species names information General resource metadata

• Data is uploaded to an embedded database from a source database or text files.

• Data is made publicly available on the GBIF distributed network.

IPT Features

• Multilingual web application• Role-based user management • Vocabularies to limit terms• Extensions for managing other data types• Basic data quality checking• Assignment / management of Globally Unique Identifiers• Searchable data with a mapping server and navigational

trees.• Ability to publish a Darwin Core archive

IPT User Interface

University of KansasDiGIR Portal

University of Kansas IPT Instance

Testhttp://129.237.201.204:8080/ipt

Productionhttp://ipt.nhm.ku.edu:8180/ipt

University of Kansas IPT Test Instance

University of Kansas IPT Test Instance

University of Kansas IPT Test Instance

Challenges

•Technical knowledge of hardware to configure for optimum performance.

•Lack of documentation to make configuration changes.

•Geoserver overhead.

•Exporting data from collection management systems (DwC format, mapping)

•Lack of documentation on what data is required for user interface to function properly.

•Technical skills required to upload data.

•Trying to implement a tool still under development.

•No DiGIR ouput.

IPT Tentative Roadmap

• The current publically accessible version of the IPT is Release Candidate (RC) 3.

• Work is ongoing to produce RC4.  • It has been determined (from feedback) that IPT needs

more substantial changes to meet expectations.  • the server capacity necessary to install and operate the

current IPT is a barrier to adoption• the lack of intuitiveness of the user interface has

been criticized• the software has become ‘bloated’ and requires

housekeeping to ensure consistency and stability.• To address this, in parallel to the work for RC4, a large

refactoring effort has been initiated and is targeted at the RC5 release.

• The RC5 release will be made to the public following a focused testing phase.

  • Following community feedback there will be an

RC6, which will only address issues surfaced in RC5, prior to a 1.0 General Availability (GA) release.  

IPT Tentative Roadmap

Discussion for the community

• What does the community need in the front-end web application?

• Is the TAPIR interface within IPT a real requirement?

IPT-related resources

• IPT code site        http://code.google.com/p/gbif-providertoolkit • IPT Mailing list

         http://lists.gbif.org/mailman/listinfo/ipt