BHL search

Following internal experiments (described here), intense (and ongoing) discussion with Pat LaFollette (@PatLaFollette), and email/twitter exchange with BHL and UBio guys (@chrisfreeland @fak3r @anthonygoddard), EarthCape BHL search is now added to the build available for testers. It has been slightly modified from what was described before (results were stored in dedicated BHL table) to actually fit the EarthCape data model.

So what happens now? (see this document for BHL data model)

• BHL Items are imported as References.
• BHL PageName becomes NameRef (working name, not documented yet, but watch this space) .
• BHL Page is attached to both NameRef and to Reference records and a large page image is downloaded on demand.
• BHL Subject was not available via the web service call so not imported.

Couple of search options added:

• Assign results to a group/project.
• Download thumbnail images (slows down considerably).
• Autocreate names (slows a bit, if the name has NameBankID checks with UBio XML Services to get (for now) the packageName to help sort out results; perhaps BHL Subject would help here).

 WARNING: BHL service returns max 100 names per search string currently. This limitation may go away or change in the future.

Custom layout to view BHL results:

GBIF Search

There isn't much exciting at the moment with GBIF import, except that one can easily plot these on the map that is either stored in EarthCape database or loaded from external source (SHP, KML, MIF, WMS, GML, TIF and pretty much any other vector and raster format). What I will explore next regarding GBIF and mapping is on-the-fly reprojecting of GBIF data to overlay with projected maps. Same idea goes for displaying the data that is already in the database (presumably different records may be in different coordinate systems) on, say, Google Maps without going through data export and coordinate transformation step before that.

So what has just happened?

Perhaps nothing much, but things starting to look a bit like web based mashups. Although with one difference. External data is being mixed with one's own data and right inside the database with the rest of the tools ready to be used. I guess this diserves a separate blog post, so I'll hold off from more commentary until I experiment more.