The National Species List (NSL) team has released the source code underpinning parts of the NSL interim service layer. This interim service layer is currently serving data from the Australian Faunal Directory (AFD) and the Australian Plant Names Index (APNI) at biodiversity.org.au, but is built to accommodate delivering arbitrary XML.
The code release encompasses an integrated implementation of a Life Sciences Identifier (LSID) resolver, Linked Data service, and Open Archives Initiative – Protocol for Metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) endpoint.
With this software, data loaded into the underlying “eXist” open-source XML database (exist.sourceforge.net) can be accessed by these three above protocols, and transformed into a variety of formats as required by content negotiation. The software supports conversion of the data into CSV, JSON, as well as transformation into arbitrary XML (and thus RDF/XML formats).
Key benefits are:
- The system is a stand-alone web server.
- The system implements an LSID resolution service out-of-the-box.
- The system exposes the data to the “Semantic Web” out-of-the-box.
- The system imposes few restrictions on the form of the XML loaded into it.
- Supports 3 million records (currently) at biodiversity.org.au
- Extensible with XSLT and XSQL
The code (and a sample data set) is available at:
and by SVN at:
For more information
Contact: Atlas Support »