[Ala-portal] Populating portal for a country

Tim Robertson trobertson at gbif.org
Thu Jun 11 09:33:07 CEST 2015


> 1) My understanding is the GBIF API has been bombarded recently and they have now put in place a limit of the number of concurrent downloads to 3. The collectory currently attempts 10 download at a time - hence our problem. 
> We’ll try and push out an update to fix this very soon.

I’d like to just explain why this was rushed out.
This was a necessary step as GBIF.org was exposed to DOS attacks (often inadvertently) which was happening.  In addition the GBIF R library now makes it trivial to download from GBIF and users can easily write a loop in code and trigger huge numbers of download which would block the system for others.

We’ll continue to tune the values by monitoring operations, and probably introduce higher per-user limits so we can e.g. increase the concurrency for known ALA accounts.

Please contact me if this causes any issue Nico.


>> On 10 Jun 2015, at 1:59 pm, Nicolas Noé <n.noe at biodiversity.be> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>> 
>> I'm trying to set-up an experimental instance of ALA for Belgium. The idea is to present all data published by our belgian institutions, in order to give those institutations / collections / datasets more visibility.
>> 
>> What's the recommended way to load this data (everything at GBIF published by Belgian institutions). I used the "Add all GBIF resource for a country" from the Collectory admin interface, but
>> 
>> 1) I encountered some errors. All datasets detected correctly, but only 10 are loaded - for the rest I get the message "Failed. Please check your authentication credentials are valid". The authentication credentials are indeed correct, since I only entered once (so, also for the working dataset). When looking at my downloads on the GBIF website, I can see no track those "failed" datasets. Can I get debugging information ? Should I fill a bug report ? In the ala-collectory repository ? Or some other ?
>> 
>> 2) Also, the /collectory/manage/gbifLoadCountry pages states that "This is a simple method of bootstrapping an installation with data provided by GBIF web services. This is not intended for long-term production use.". So maybe I should use another method to load all the data for my country.
>> 
>> 3) How are the (dataset) metadata populated when using this method ? It seems the basic metadata is there, but not much more. Should we do it by hand ? Should we write a tool to do it ? How about updates?
>> 
>> Thanks a lot!
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