[seek-dev] Re: lsids and you

Matt Jones jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
Wed Nov 10 09:17:23 PST 2004


Hi Dave,

Sounds like a plan.  We run several servers with Tomcat: dev, ecoinfo, 
ecoinfo2.  "dev" is a development machine, you can do anything to it 
without consequence, but try to be nice.  "ecoinfo" is our main 
production machine, it serves lots of people, breaking it in any way 
would be bad.  "ecoinfo2" is our secondary production machine -- it runs 
our ecogrid node and is slated to take over many services for ecoinfo.

I guess if I had my preference I'd like to see an LSID server installed 
on dev with all necessary code and dependencies checked into CVS along 
with a build file that would allow us to edit a build.properties file 
and then "ant deploy" to install the server on any host.  This will 
allow us to test more thoroughly before we deploy on our production 
machines.  Once tested, I'd probably recommend we install it on 
ecoinfo2.  I have created an account for you on dev.nceas.ucsb.edu (same 
username and password as your cvs account).  Servlet code goes in 
/opt/tomcat/webapps, and you should have write access there. Tomcat runs 
as user "webuser", so make sure appropriate permissions are set for that 
user.

We want LSID access to Metacat objects (a variety of types) and other 
systems like SRB.  We're going to have to make some changes to metacat, 
or at least to the metacat ecogrid interface, to support LSID's in 
identifiers for EML documents.  But for now one can construct a 
pseudo-identifier in LSID format from the existing formats:

Example metacat id:  knb.2.1
   Constructed LSID:  urn:lsid:lsid.ecoinformatics.org:knb:2:1

You can retrieve a document from metacat with a URL access or via the 
ecogrid get() interface:

http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/knb/metacat?action=read&qformat=xml&docid=knb-lter-gce.109.5

or, for HTML format change qformat=xml to qformat=knb:

http://knb.ecoinformatics.org/knb/metacat?action=read&qformat=knb&docid=knb-lter-gce.109.5

We'll need to talk more about how to do this and how to fully support it 
in metacat.  There's a 'system' attribute in EML documents that is 
supposed ot indicate the authority of the identifier, but I'm not yet 
using it in the sceme above.  Let me know how the DNS records need to be 
updated.

Matt

dave thau wrote:
> Howdy!
> 
> I'm back in Spain and ready to code.  I think it would be best to install
> a second LSID authority for your use.  The kansas folks keep a tight lid
> on access to the machine hosting the current lsid server, so you'd have to
> deal with them whenever you wanted to give someone else access to the
> machine running the code.
> 
> The LSID stuff runs under tomcat, so if you can give me access to a
> machine already set up with tomcat, that would be best.  I'll also need
> some information about how to access the types of things you want to give
> LSIDs, and which things those are.
> 
> What do you say?
> 
> Dave

-- 
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Matt Jones                                     jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439    Ph: 907-789-0496
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
University of California Santa Barbara
Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
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