[Hit] Introductory message

[Kyle Braak (GBIF)]

Dear Harvesting and Indexing Toolkit (HIT) mailing list,

Please consider this message an introductory one, providing you with  
some basic information about the HIT, and making a call for wider  
testing and evaluation.  Similar messages will be sent out  
periodically, to update everybody on the status of the project and  
provide other relevant news.

Of course, several of the people that will read this message are  
already actively a part of the project in some way. To those people,  
I'd like to say that I'm really happy to have you onboard.

For those who aren't aware of what the HIT is, however, it is an open  
source Java-based web application developed by the Secretariat of the  
GBIF (http://www.gbif.org/) to manage biodiversity data harvesting and  
quickly build indexes of harvested data. The HIT is capable of  
harvesting data from data publishers exposing their data through three  
protocols: Distributed Generic Information Retrieval (DiGIR),  
Biological Collection Access Service (BioCASe), and TDWG Access  
Protocol for Information Retrieval (TAPIR). It can also harvest data  
directly from a single export, created in accordance with the new  
Darwin Core terms as a dump in Archive format. By accessing various  
data publishers through a single tool, the HIT provides a convenient  
mechanism to manage indexing operations.  Ultimately, it could allow  
for the building of a portal on top of the database, which would then  
provide an additional means of accessing the data by the community.

Currently the HIT is in a pre release-candidate ("early-bird") version  
(0.9). You can view a roadmap of the project with its future  
milestones here: http://code.google.com/p/gbif-indexingtoolkit/wiki/Roadmap

At this stage, if you haven't had the chance to play with the tool, I  
invite you to install it on your local machine or server and give it a  
try. The installation instructions are relatively straightforward, and  
can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/gbif-indexingtoolkit/wiki/Installation 
  To assist with learning how to operate it, there is a first version  
of a user manual that has been developed, found here: http://code.google.com/p/gbif-indexingtoolkit/wiki/UserManual

For more general information on the project, you could visit the  
project's home site here: http://code.google.com/p/gbif-indexingtoolkit/

To highlight any enhancement requests or errors arising during use,  
you could fill in a new issue here: http://code.google.com/p/gbif-indexingtoolkit/issues/list 
  and we'll try to take it into consideration as quickly as possible.

In other cases, you could direct questions to this mailing list or  
certainly contact me directly at kbraak at gbif.org. I insist that any  
feedback at all you have is welcome, in an effort to make the project  
as robust as possible.

Thank you for your attention and assistance,

Kyle Braak
Programmer
Global Biodiversity Information Facility Secretariat
Universitetsparken 15, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark
Tel: +45-35321479 Fax: +45-35321480
URL: http://www.gbif.org

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