1 Definition
Biological Collection Access Service for Europe (BioCASE) is a transnational network of biological collections of all kinds. BioCASE Protocol is the protocol used in the BioCASE unit-level network for communication between the central software and the wrapper software sitting on top of the providers databases.
2 Objectives
- Unify communications for biological collections
- Common understanding for all the community of heterogeneous European biological collection and observational databases
- Open protocol
3 Owner
BioCASE Protocol was created during BioCASE's EU-funded project phase (2001-2004) by partners from 31 countries. It is now currently developed by Consortium of European Taxonomy Facilities (CETAF).
4 Intended audience
BioCASE Protocol was developed especially for users of the BioCASE network.
5 Long description
BioCASE enables widespread unified access to distributed and heterogeneous European biological collection and observational databases using open-source, system-independent software and open data standards and protocols.
To help reaching this goal, BioCASE Protocol was created, defining the ways of querying the wrapper and how an answer is delivered. This hard-coded protocol is responsible for a successful communication between the Provider Software and a client application. It doesn’t know anything about the “real” biological or whatever data that is queried and transmitted. It defines certain activities or methods that are understood by the wrapper and the client applications.
BioCASE messages are specific XML documents that are passed between a client and a provider.
The protocol defines three types of requests: Capabilities for introspecting the configuration of a BioCASe web service, Scan for getting the distinctive values for a concept provided by the web service, and Search for retrieving the full set of information published for certain records.
The response message of a provider carries the requested data within the message envelope - in the example below an ABCD (Access to Biological Collection Data) document, hierarchical schema used by BioCASE.
6 How to participate
You can contact the BioCASe Support at support@biocase.org
7 History / Key milestones
During BioCASE's EU-funded project phase (2001-2004), partners from 31 countries established the network, starting with meta-information on thousands of biological collections, and followed by a unit-level access network. Within the first years, the results comprised the BioCASe Protocol, the ABCD data schema and the BioCASe Provider Software.
8 Additional documents
Links to further reading
· Last version of the BioCASE Protocol: http://www.bgbm.org/BioDivInf/Schema/default.asp#UAP
· ABCD (Access to Biological Collections Data) Schema: http://www.bgbm.org/TDWG/CODATA/Schema/default.htm