HermesLite
Gaia Resources developed HermesLite as a project for the Western Australian Museum, and was funded by the Australian Biological Resources Study. The whole project has since been released as an open source project on SourceForge under a GNU General Public Licence.
What is it?
HermesLite is deployable in two configurations. In data retrieval mode, it sits inside of an institutional network and extracts and sends data out of the network securely. This data is sent to the data receival and storage deployment, which takes the data, translates it and then stores it in a database according to a schema that you specify. In a sense, it looks like the diagram below.
Once data is received by the receival and storage deployment, it can then readily be used in a range of other applications, like TAPIRLink or as WMS and WFS feeds via MapServer. A more detailed introduction to HermesLite can be found in presentations we've done at the 2008 Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) conference. This involves a Powerpoint presentation (1.9MB PPT) or a Flash video (7.8MB SWF).
What do I need to do to get started?
Before you start, there are a few things that you need to consider:
- Do you have an external server? This needs to be outside of a firewall, and you will need to be able to install software on it including Apache, PostgreSQL, TAPIRLink and MapServer. If you don't then please contact us. We have servers that can be used or we can help you to set one up. This is probably the biggest consideration and overhead to implementing HermesLite.
- Do you use Life Science IDentifiers (LSIDs), or plan to? If you do use LSIDs already, then you will need to make sure that the external server has the URL used in the Authority component. If you don't yet use LSIDs, the External Server's URL should be used in your LSIDs. Under this model, the External Server, with TAPIRLink installed, can resolve them for you.
- Do you have access to someone with Java coding abilities? At this time, you will need to change the code in the "Receive & Store Mode" to configure the mapping from your database to the database structure in the External Database. We are looking to upgrade the mapping ability in this tool with a user interface. Again, if you need help, just ask us, because we can help set up your External Server remotely.
If you have all these things, then you are ready to go! Head on over to the SourceForge Project and get started.
For more information about HermesLite, contact either Tim Carpenter or Piers Higgs here at Gaia Resources via email, or phone us on +61 8 92277309.
Please note that Gaia Resources has released HermesLite as an open source product, under a GNU General Public Licence. As such, we provide assistance where we can (or where we are asked to), but we do not automatically and freely provide any warranty or support for the product in your implementation.
