Yes, definitely agree with you there Dan.

Hi Nick,

Thanks for the reply - detail on your points below

The idea is to extend the taxonomic levels taht can be filtered on - though apparently you rapidly spiral off into taxonomic hierarch issues - not techincally difficult for the webservices to implement - but some question as to whether the dictiornaries are upto it !

I would hope that whatever gets implemented that as a minimum the possibility to submit multiple taxon version keys, or user defined designations or improved taxonomic designation will allow us to get more tightly defined lists back - to be honest any one of those 3 would give you reasonable control - though of course for one application or another it might be desirable to use different criteria

1.4    Improve filtering options on the request
Currently filtering is possible on one species, a group, a designation (now really a server side list) or a dataset.  This often means that much more data is requested from the server than is actually wanted.

•    Allowing the request to handle multiple species would greatly improve the efficiency of some client applications (which currently either have to request repeatedly for each species or request all the species and filter on the client side) both of which are very inefficient.

•    Additionally, the groups could be extended to allow a greater range of taxonomic levels.  Currently there are fixed groups that can be filtered for – and these don’t always meet requirements. Not sure if the dictionary is good enough to support this reliably through the TaxonAggregate table.

•    Thirdly the handling of server side lists should be extended.  Currently a web services request can specify that the response should only contain data for BAP species, species of conservation concern and a limited number of other lists. We are limited by the number of lists that we can currently manage (32).  The list identifier should not be an enumerated type to make the addition (and consumption) of new lists possible without having to re-consume the WSDL and rebuild proxy classes.  This could be extended to cater for an arbitrarily large number of filters. Web services users could specify the taxa in a filter to the Gateway service team, who would then add the filter to the database.  As an addition an interface could be designed for user management of these lists.  This would enable clients to actually just get back the data they want !

1.5    Extend / enhance Discovery services – Species List
The species list discovery service is very useful to get a quick summary of what exists in a particular area.  For many applications this is not quite enough, forcing users to request the complete list of detailed species records simply to build a summary in the client side

Add an option switch to additionally return:
•    Number of records for each species
•    Date species last recorded
•    Whether download permission exists for this species at the current access level (at the moment you often drill down to discover that there are no detailed records available)

An additional option switch might be used for the spatial data to return a list of unique positions for each species (with the option to generalise the accuracy upto 1km etc).  This would allow many species distribution type applications to get all the data without having downloaded the detailed species data – thus keeping the response size as compact as possible

1.6    Additional discovery services
Discovery services are missing for:
•    known site boundaries - held on the NBN Gateway. Includes SSSI, ASSI, SPA, SAC, Vice County, RAMSAR, NNR sites. The site ID and provider ID are the values you should use if filtering by known site.
•    taxon groups - The taxon group keys are those you should use when filtering on a taxon group
•    designation types - The taxon designation keys are those you should use when filtering on a taxon designation.

Currently these have to be downloaded from the gateway website as a spreadsheet.

Hope this clarifies some of the points
Best wishes
James

Hi James

Sorry, probably did not make it clear that I was refering to the Taxonomy web service http://data.nbn.org.uk/library/webservi … xonomy.jsp - which does not currently have other options for refined searches but it would be helpful if it did

Cheers

Nick

Hi Dan and James,

A Happy New year to you both. 

We've been through James's web services review (me, Steve W, Geoff Johnson, Nicole and Richard) and adjusted the priorities a bit.  I'll post this on the forum next week.  I'll be scoping the tasks next week (already started some of them) and then put together my work plan so you can see when to expect things.  This work is due to be completed by the end of the financial year.

What I want to do is use this forum to keep you up-to-date with how the work is going and to publish functionality onto www.testnbn.net where we will be testing it and you can test it if you want to (which would be really useful).

More details next week.

Cheers, Jon