Forum — Gateway Announcements

Improved access requests/Notification

null@example.com (BDeed) — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 13:12:19 +0000

Just a note to say we are still getting quite a few improved access requests coming through. While i am responding to each in term to inform them current levels of access will not be possible from March. It might be worth adding a notice somewhere on the Gateway itself to say that it is due to be decommissioned and any 'improved' access will be lost.

This had been our primary way of sharing free, full resolution data with a number of national partners such as JNCC/CEH, naturalists and academics but with the loss of controls we will no longer be able to provide such access. I suspect even now a number of them may still be unaware have all Gateway users (as opposed to just suppliers) been notified that permissions may soon be lost?

Dataset download log

null@example.com (chrisjohnson) — Mon, 27 Feb 2017 19:40:21 +0000

Hello,
With the closure of the Gateway will the download logs for datatsets disappear or will they be available from the Atlas?
We use these stats as part of our reporting process and if they will no longer be available I will have to download the csv files before the Gateway closes.

Many thanks

Christine

Update on NBN Gateway and NBN Atlas with key dates

null@example.com (Mandy Henshall) — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 15:11:32 +0000

Dear NBN Data Partners,

At the NBN Conference 2016 it was announced that the NBN Gateway will permanently close on 31st March 2017; the NBN Atlas will supersede the NBN Gateway and will be live from 1st April 2017.

In order to allow time for datasets to be transferred from the NBN Gateway to the NBN Atlas ready for 1st April 2017 (where Data Partners have agreed to this), the deadline for data submissions to the NBN Gateway is Tuesday 28th February 2017. Unfortunately, any datasets submitted to the NBN Gateway after this date will not be accepted. All subsequent datasets for inclusion in the NBN Atlas will need to be submitted directly to the NBN Atlas (further information on this process will be available soon).

As we have already communicated to data partners, the transfer of datasets from the NBN Gateway to the NBN Atlas requires official approval in the form of a Data Partner Agreement. Thank you to everyone who has already returned their Agreements. The official deadline for the return of these has now passed, but we do still need to receive them from you. If there are any remaining Data Partner Agreements to be submitted then please do so before 28th February 2017 in line with the final submission date for the NBN Gateway. After this date, datasets will need to be submitted directly to the NBN Atlas, along with the accompanying Data Partner Agreement. The Agreements have been sent to your dataset administrator for the NBN Gateway, so please check with them if you haven’t received it for action.

The last submission of data from the NBN Gateway to GBIF took place in December 2016. There will therefore be no further submissions of data from the NBN Gateway to GBIF; all future data submissions will be run from the NBN Atlas.

Further information regarding the transition from the NBN Gateway to the NBN Atlas for NBN Data Partners will be made available in due course.

Key dates at a glance
* 28 February 2017 - deadline for data submissions to the NBN Gateway
* 28 February 2017 - absolute deadline for return of Data Partner Agreements
* 31st March 2017 - NBN Gateway will close
* 1st April 2017 - NBN Atlas goes live

Thank you for your ongoing support with this major change to how we share our biodiversity data. If you have any questions please do get in touch with the NBN Secretariat at support@nbn.org.uk

Kind regards,
JNCC and NBN Secretariat

For further details on the NBN Atlas, please see https://nbn.org.uk/about-us/where-we-are/ and https://nbn.org.uk/blogs/atlas-blog/nbn … ss-update/

IMT timing out

null@example.com (charliebarnes) — Tue, 25 Oct 2016 13:04:04 +0000

Adding species layers and sites on the IMT is timing out at the moment

Login problems

null@example.com (BDeed) — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 10:27:33 +0000

I'm having some login issues this morning. All other aspects of the Gateway seem to be functioning.

"Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator at [no address given] to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log."

NBN Gateway and feedback

null@example.com (NBN Support) — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 15:20:54 +0000

We appreciate your ongoing concerns regarding the NBN Gateway and we are monitoring the Forum for posts and feedback. However, as mentioned in August’s Network News “the scope to expand the technological functionality offered by the current system is limited, so it has unfortunately become unviable to continue to support and develop the NBN Gateway as our data sharing infrastructure.” https://nbn.org.uk/news/future-nbn-gate … cess-data/
Unfortunately, this means that we can only try to stabilise the performance of the current Gateway to try and minimise the issues with downtime. As soon as the NBN Secretariat or the development team are aware of the Gateway being offline, we will endeavour to post in this Forum and will keep you informed, as far as we can, with likely timescales for resolving the issues.

Please be assured that we do note your comments and feedback, but it is not always possible to respond to every message in the Forum's various threads. We do, however, value ongoing, helpful feedback.

Thank you.
NBN Support team

Data Licensing on the NBN Gateway

null@example.com (TeresaF) — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 14:14:26 +0000

See NBN enews article http://nbn.org.uk/News/Latest-news/Data … teway.aspx

This is a welcome development thank you, and CBDC and Tullie House would like to apply a licence to our public level datasets in principle. I just have a couple of key question first though for the NBNT and Gateway team, before I tick the box:

1. Can you clarify that the licence will apply to the public level data only?

1. Is it clear to users that have enhanced access (i.e. greater grid reference resolution, site name, recorder name and other attributes) that the data they themselves can see and download is not creative commons licenced?

Thanks very much,

Teresa.

Requesting test account on BRC Warehouse

null@example.com (cwdee) — Thu, 04 Jun 2015 20:12:09 +0000

I hope this is the correct place to post this - it's not really about the NBN gateway, but it is where the Indicia documentation directed me to make such a request.

I'm working on a Drupal 7 website for the Hertfordshire Natural History Society with the aim of using the Indicia Forms module to capture records and store on the BRC Warehouse. Could I please have a test account on that warehouse? How do I later request a 'live' account?

Many thanks, Chris

Discontinuing NBN Gateway 4 and the SOAP Webservices

null@example.com (paul.gilbertson) — Fri, 20 Mar 2015 17:30:54 +0000

For the past eighteen months the old NBN Gateway and its attendant SOAP webservices have been kept running as a courtesy to our users and to allow them to migrate over to the new NBN Gateway and the REST webservices. We have announced from time to time that we would be discontinuing these services at the end of this financial year.

NBN Gateway 4 and the SOAP webservices will cease to function on April 30th 2015. Websites which use these old webservices will no longer receive data from the legacy Gateway, and NBN Gateway 4 will cease to function.

Those users who have migrated to the new REST webservices will see no changes, nor will the users of the BRC Easymaps system who were migrated about a year ago. The current NBN Gateway will be unaffected by these changes.

For any developers who need to migrate off the services, the documentation for the new REST webservices is available from the Documentation link on the current NBN Gateway

If you have any enquires please do not hesitate to contact support@nbn.org.uk

Short Update on the current status of NBN Development

null@example.com (matt.debont) — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 15:21:15 +0000

I have been passed a short piece of text regarding our (JNCC's) position to some of the issues regarding the current status of development on the NBN Gateway, to try and keep our users and contributors in the loop I have posted the text below;

Paul Gilbertson wrote:

I wish to put out our current position with regards to GBIF and the development of Record Commenting functionality.
GBIF – As you may or may not be aware GBIF consulted on changing their terms and conditions around submitted datasets, at various points this included moving to a CC0 stance. At the same time a consultation was undertaken on NBN access controls and reporting requirements.
This threw up a number of issues between the NBN Terms and Conditions and GBIFs. Additionally the removal of the ‘view only’ control (as part of Gateway 5) would potentially cause a number of additional datasets that previously would not have been pushed to GBIF to be uploaded a decision was taken to suspend updating datasets until the issues were resolved.
It is my understanding that the forced move to CC0 is off the table, so the worst clash has gone, but there are three remaining issues:
Reporting: We guaranteed to data providers that any viewing or downloading of records would be tracked on the Gateway and reported to administrators. We cannot track data on the GBIF portal, so data passed to there could be downloaded and viewed freely and we would not track this.
Legal Issues: There are a number of legal issues around the NBN Terms and Conditions and their incompatibility with the GBIF portals. You grant us the right to distribute data under the NBN’s, we cannot arbitrarily re-licence that data. This is important to a number of data providers.
Data Withdrawal: GBIF were looking into a mechanism around DoIs that would mean that data providers could not remove data from the GBIF portal. Given that we provide a mechanism for you to change access controls to withdraw or blur data, we needed GBIF to be able to reflect your wishes.
In order to solve the above, we have decided that the best way to tackle the situation would be to develop an opt-in mechanism for exporting to GBIF. Dataset administrators could opt datasets in and acknowledge that they were accepting GBIF’s T&Cs. This is still the plan. However, the NBN Gateway budget took a significant hit this year as part of general Government cut backs, and unfortunately development was halted.
In parallel the NBNT is currently working with GBIF to try and align the two mechanisms better but in the interim the publication to GBIF has been frozen.
Record Commenting –The feedback from the NBN strategy workshops has raised this as valuable to reinstate and also highlighted the importance of unique IDs for records in the UK NBN system. Work is continuing around developing the functionality for record verification and record commenting, and this will be tested by Gateway User Group first. However, the pace of work has also been affected by the cuts. We plan to get a first release of some functionality before the User Group this financial year.
I hope this answers your questions, and I wish the news were better. The Gateway has always operated under a small budget and a ‘best effort basis’. Government cutbacks have caused the pressure on that budget to increase, and so we cannot with all the will in the world, proceed any better than we are.

NBN Gateway Downtime - September

null@example.com (matt.debont) — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 10:59:21 +0000

There will be some downtime over the weekend of 20 - 21 September, this is due to some necessary software updates to the hardware that backs a number of systems at CEH. There should be no effect to the gateway other than downtime during this weekend. We will update this message closer to the time but the gateway should be only affected by this for those days.

Matt

NBN Gateway downtime

null@example.com (Graham French) — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 09:37:32 +0000

Due to maintenance work in CEH Lancaster, the NBN Gateway and web services will be unavailable on Saturday 16th August from 9am onwards for approximately 6 hours and will remain at risk until 9am Monday 18th August.

We apologies for any issues this may cause.

NBN Gateway downtime

null@example.com (Graham French) — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 14:29:06 +0000

The NBN Gateway will be down from 11:00AM on Wednesday 18th June for around 2 hours to fix a hardware issue. We apologise for the short notice and any inconvenience caused.

Graham
NBN Technical Liaison Officer

NBN Gateway update - download logs and registration

null@example.com (Mandy Henshall) — Wed, 28 May 2014 16:25:26 +0000

We wanted to update everyone regarding the NBN Gateway and some recent issues. There was an update to the NBN Gateway earlier this month which should improve performance and stability, but unfortunately we encountered some other issues over the last few days which have affected download logs and registration. Registration and login issues are now resolved and the technical team hopes to fix the download log issue tomorrow. You can read more about the update here: http://nbn.org.uk/News/Latest-news/NBN- … mance.aspx

We apologise if we have been slow to respond to queries. The technical team is working hard on the NBN Gateway and issues as they arise, but they and the NBN Trust Secretariat do try to monitor all the comments and feedback as soon as possible. It is vital that we continue to hear of any problems or suggestions, so do keep the feedback coming, be it via this Forum, the NBN Facebook page, Twitter or access@nbn.org.uk

We thank you all for your patience and ongoing support.

Request for early warning for Gateway maintenance and updates

null@example.com (Luck) — Wed, 21 May 2014 10:50:06 +0000

Is it possible to request for any Gateway maintenance and updates date to be posted on the forum?
As our report now depending on the data feeds from the gateway.

Thanks,
Luck