[Isis-users] RES: about ABCD v2.0b

Wed Jan 21 14:06:19 CET 2015

Dear Egbert

About the problems with meta-search, let me ask you to change the parameter 'count=1' to 'count=0' to see if it fixes the problem.

On the other hand, about the problem with ISIS-OAI-Provider, one cannot only provide executables and change parameters in the config file if the application code itself does not understand those parameters as valid. That is to say, for the application the only two valid contents for the IsisKeyLength parameter are 1030 and 1660. As previously stated in our mail, it is required to change the code in the application and update the GitHub repository for the application itself be prepared for non-standard ISIS databases.

Best regards

Asael Costa Silva
System Analyst - RST/MTI
BIREME / PAHO / WHO
Knowledge Management, Bioethics and Research

Mail: silvaasa at paho.org
Phone:  +55 11 5576-9819
 VoIP: 44838

De: De Smet Egbert [mailto:egbert.desmet at uantwerpen.be]
Enviada em: terça-feira, 20 de janeiro de 2015 19:36
Para: Silva, Asael Costa da (BIR); isis-users at iccisis.org
Cc: bvs.technical.support at listas.bireme.br; Murasaki, Renato (BIR); Camilo, Ana Katia (BIR); Brito, Fabio Luis de (BIR)
Assunto: RE: about ABCD v2.0b

Dear Asael,

I am very glad that BIREME is still interested in support to CISIS as we are using it in ABCD.
I think the best I can do in order to make our problem(s) as clear as possible, is to set up a publicly available server running ABCD v2.0b and give you the necessary examples in order to see the 2 main problems :
- searches through Site Metasearch always end with an exclamation mark (!), indicating a technical problem, whereas the configuration in Site/Admin is correct as far as we can see, e.g. correctly referring to the special version of wxis to be used for each non-standard database; the same searches in iAH work very well however. Copy/pasting exactly the same URL directly into the browser however indicates a problem with the XML-data to be parsed.
- searching with the verbs Identify, ListMetadataFormats and ListSets works very well in our ABCD-implementation of Isis-OAI-provider, but when we try ListIdentifiers, ListRecords or GetRecord, in other words : when really a database has to be searched, the result is empty. We have - as far as we can see - correctly used the IsisKeyLength parameter to refer to other than 1030 or 1660 databases and put the according versions of wxis into appropriately named exe's, e.g. wxisbi (for wxis BigISIS) or wxisffi (for wxis FFI). When we print the URL for debugging we can see these are also correctly constructed, but simply, as in the case of the Site, the results are empty.
So give me a few days to prepare all this carefully in order to make your part of the challenge as concise as possible.
Again : thanks for listening to us.
Egbert de Smet
Universiteit Antwerpen
________________________________
From: Silva, Asael Costa da (BIR) [silvaasa at paho.org]
Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2015 6:26 PM
To: De Smet Egbert; isis-users at iccisis.org<mailto:isis-users at iccisis.org>
Cc: bvs.technical.support at listas.bireme.br<mailto:bvs.technical.support at listas.bireme.br>; Murasaki, Renato (BIR); Camilo, Ana Katia (BIR); Brito, Fabio Luis de (BIR)
Subject: RE: about ABCD v2.0b
Dear Egbert

Thank you very much for your message.

In order to address the issues described in your mail, we would like to clarify some information:

>> searching in iAH works well but calling exactly the same searches from ABCD Site with its 'meta-search' feature as a URL, this doesn't work for an unknown reason

1. can you please tell us what versions of both IAH and ABCD Site (based on VHL Site)?
2. what is the local environment where these problems occur (Apache, PHP, SO etc), including versions?
3. can you give us examples of URLs for both cases (IAH and ‘meta-search’ parameters)?
4. is it possible to have access via HTTP to IAH and ABCD-Site where theses problems occur?
5. is there any error message displayed or just a different result between the search modes (IAH and meta-search)? Please describe the expected and abnormal behaviors.

>> non-standard CISIS-databases do not work properly in Isis-OAI-Provider (probably for the same reason as the previous issue : they are accessed by a 'search-URL')

ISIS-OAI-Provider was designed to work with standard versions (1030 and 1660) as possible to view in the documentation (http://wiki.bireme.org/en/index.php/Installing_isis-oai-provider#oai-databases.php) through ISIS_KEY_LENGTH parameter.
In order to work properly with non-standard CISIS, it is necessary to refactory and/or make changes in the architecture of the application.

The method wxis_url from file (https://github.com/bireme/isis-oai-provider/blob/master/htdocs/isis-oai-provider/lib/ISISDb.php) codes only those two standard versions, but have room to implement as many versions as required.

Other technical issues are that gizmo files distributed with the application are only compatible to standard CISIS and WXIS executables must be provided accordingly. (https://github.com/bireme/isis-oai-provider/tree/master/cgi-bin)

We foster and appreciate any contributions from community to enhance/improve the application code to support non-standard  ISIS databases, after all, the ISIS-OAI-Provider is FLOSS.

Asael Costa da Silva

Systems Analyst - Technical Support Network
BIREME / PAHO / WHO<http://www.paho.org/bireme/>
Department of Knowledge Management, Bioethics and Research – KBR

Phone: +55 11 5576-9819
VoIP: 44838
silvaasa at paho.org<mailto:silvaasa at paho.org>

________________________________
From: isis-users [isis-users-bounces+silvaasa=paho.org at iccisis.org] on behalf of De Smet Egbert [egbert.desmet at uantwerpen.be]
Sent: Friday, January 09, 2015 14:11
To: isis-users at iccisis.org<mailto:isis-users at iccisis.org>
Subject: [Isis-users] about ABCD v2.0b

Dear all,

with my best wishes for a good year 2015 I am happy to announce availability of ABCD v2.0beta.
This has been on its way since quite long in fact. One of the main new features, justifying the 'major' upgrade to '2', i.e. the 'full-text' digital library feature, was already demonstrated by myself in an international conference (in New Delhi, India) 3 years ago... but kept hanging in for long time for reasons explained below.

We have now finalized two main scripts for this 'digital library' feature :
- a script (using Tika Server from Apache) which loads all documents in a pre-defined folder on the ABCD-server, preserving the underlying structure of sub-folders as searchable 'sections' of the 'repository', into a database with the existing metadata (embedded into the documents, as far as available in DC) and - if included into the field-selection based on Dublin Core - the complete text-extraction into a dedicated field which will be full-text indexed. After a full-index generation of the newly created database, which goes reasonably fast as we use the /n option of CISIS (MFN as the only posting), the database can be fully used in ABCD Central (e.g. editing metadata) and searched/displayed in the ABCD iAH-OPAC.
- another script will allow to interactively upload one or more documents from a (local) machine to the ABCD-server and have it incorporated into the database mentioned above. So after initial creation of a collection with this script the collection-database can be gradually updated with new documents.
- individual records ('documents') can be 'protected' by a password field in the record to allow self-submission of documents by authors without jeopardizing the records by other authors (an ABCD 'profile' to only allow data-entry access to the repository database is to be created).

Other good news about this version 2.0b :
- added : module 'Online Document Delivery Services' (ODDS)
- added : new module OAI (Isis-OAI-Provider from BIREME)
- added : thesaurus feature (Guilda's thesaurus consultation during data-entry and/or searching)
- added : several new utilities creating loanobjects/copies databases,
- added : duplication checker
- added : barcode checker (for stock-taking)
- added : record-splitter based on repeatable field
- soon to be added : RFID/SIP2 functions for automation of loan-functions by robots
- soon to be added : LDAP functions
- soon to be added : Unicode support.
with most of the new utilities 'made in Cuba'.

However there is also some bad news : some new features, based on non-standard versions of the CISIS-utilities of BIREME, don't fully function correctly, more specifically :
- searching in iAH works well but calling exactly the same searches from ABCD Site with its 'meta-search' feature as a URL, this doesn't work for an unknown reason;
- non-standard CISIS-databases do not work properly in Isis-OAI-Provider (probably for the same reason as the previous issue : they are accessed by a 'search-URL');
- Unicode is still to be tested much more by experts of non-Latin languages.

In fact these three pending issues have made me delay to publish of this version for now about 2 years, but I no longer can justify such delay any further. If people are really interested in using these new features in ABCD, they will have to add their voices to mine (which was too weak clearly) by asking BIREME to check for this. I only got the disappointing advice to use 'ISIS1030' type of 'LILACS'-style database, therefore foregoing all new modern non-traditional library uses of ISIS in ABCD and putting us back into the 80's... The main special versions of CISIS to be considered are 'BigISIS' (big records and databases, only available for Linux), 'FFI' (big records for Windows but without incremental indexing) and Unicode CISIS. Since BIREME is moving out of their 'BVS Site' (the one used in ABCD) the problem of the Site (as much as we could verify/test only when doing meta-search to non-standard CISIS databases) has very low priority, however since also OAI seems to be affected with a similar problem, we hope they will still address the issue as this is also relevant for their own network of the BVS.
I have not been able to convince BIREME of the importance of the possibility to fully use 1Mb-records in ISIS as done in BigISIS and FFI (while this was nevertheless part of the initial ABCD-contract and therefore always has been the idea). I am afraid it will take many more voices to still convince them.

I am availing this new version 2.0beta from my server abcd.netcat.be/files. Other than the mentioned issues, which do not affect normal operations of all other basic ABCD-functions, this version is fully compatible with (because based on) version 1.4.

Also a new downloads-page is created with a new 'tab' for documentation. One important new document is a manual on EmpWeb (draft version for comments) but the new v2.0b features still need to be added to the manual of ABC of ABCD, which we hope to do in the coming few months.

Please feel free to send me feedback.
Egbert de Smet
Universiteit Antwerpen

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