From this page you can access the resources related to InforMEA API implementation
- Introduction
- Data harvesting from MEAs
- The InforMEA Toolkit
- The InforMEA Brand Manual
Introduction
The purpose of the InforMEA API is to establish a communication protocol between InforMEA database and its data providers, the MEAs. Currently, this is a one-way communication, with data flowing from the MEAs to the InforMEA database.
The underlying protocol used to transport data is based on the OData web protocol. Together with our initial MEA contributors we have agreed on the format of the envelope that is defined on top of OData. The specifications for this format are defined on this Google document.
Data harvesting from MEAs
Currently there are about 14 secretariats who have granted access to their data as web data service, using the OData web protocol. The exposed data consists of:
- Decisions – COP/MOP decisions as documents and metadata
- Meetings – COP/MOP or other events
- Contacts – List of National Focal Points (NFPs)
- Parties – Countries that are parties to the Convention
We are regularly harvesting this data and updating the InforMEA index with this data. The status of this harvesing can be found on this Google document.
The InforMEA Toolkit
Due to the fact that some of the MEAs do not possess the capacity to implement this kind of data provider on top of their CMS/database, and also in order to optimized their costs in adventuring in such endeavour, the MEA IKM initiative has funded the development of a software toolkit that allows MEAs to install on their infrastructure and, with a proper configuration, allows exposure of the data via the OData web protocol. In return, InforMEA can harvest this information and index into the website.
We have made the implementation open source (distributed under GPL v3 licence) and the source code, packages and documentation is available below.
Latest InforMEA API is 1.5.7.
We encourage you to always use the latest version, all versions are backwards compatible.
If you want to deploy the toolkit on your infrastructure, download the document containing instructions from here.
| Date | Version | API document | JavaDoc | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 Nov 2012 | 1.5.7 | Browse (Google Docs) | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 27 July 2012 | 1.5.6 | Browse (Google Docs) | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 18 Jul 2012 | 1.5.5 | Browse (Google Docs) | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 3 Jul 2012 | 1.5.4 | Browse (Google Docs) | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 5 May 2012 | 1.5.3 | Browse (Google Docs) | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 22 Mar 2012 | 1.4.4 | Browse (Google Docs) | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 24 Nov 2011 | 1.4.3 | Browse (Google Docs) | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 4 Nov 2011 | 1.4.2 | Browse (Google Docs) | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 31 Oct 2011 | 1.4.1 | Browse (Google Docs) | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 31 Oct 2011 | 1.4.0 | Browse (Google Docs) | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 26 Oct 2011 | 1.3.5 | Download | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
Change log
Version 1.5.7:
- Added support for PostgreSQL database
Version 1.5.6:
- Fixed bug with meetings for the Plant Treaty OData provider
Version 1.5.5:
- Fixed problem with decoding of Treaty enumeration for treaties containing dash (-), such as plant-treaty which is equivalent to Treaty.PLANT_TREATY enumeration
- Meetings are now sorted on server-side by start date descending, by default
Version 1.5.4:
- Added new supported values to Treaty enumeration (ESPOO, ABIDJAN etc.)
- Fixed issues with enumerated values (ex. meeting access, meeting type etc.). When value is empty string error occurred. Now is treated as null (ignored)
- Fixed documentation problem on informea_sites_name view
- Add support for hosting more toolkits on same server (Java Preferences API namespaces)
Version 1.5.3:
- Implemented peblds odata synchronization support into the toolkit
- Removed validation for meetings->city – The toolkit threw error whenever a null city of a meeting was encountered. City is not mandatory (found on itpgr-fao)
Version 1.4.2
- Fixed issue – Toolkit cannot be configured with empty password for database connection
- Improved error handling, reporting and validation during configuration process
Version 1.4.1
- Fixed broken link to service endpoint in status page
- Fixed bug in status page where decisions are shown as enabled even if they are not
Version 1.4.0
- Added support to host decision documents on another server (file is downloaded via document.url property before being served as ‘document.content’ binary property)
- Fixed API documentation and JavaDoc issues in code
- Fixed database connection issues in C3P0 – connection is now validate before pool checkout
- Fixed duplicate results due to Hibernate one-to-many properties being eagerly fetched
- Minor logging improvements
Version 1.3.5
- Added support for OData pagination. Server-side pagination is enabled by default
Version 1.3.4
- Added two new properties into the specificiation – latitude and longitude double floating point for Ramsar and UNESCO sites
- Bug fix: Toolkit – Trim input data to remove spaces from the values in case of errors
- Dropped JRun support as it cannot work in single instance installation with ColdFusion
Version 1.3.3
- Implemented new reusable Tookit. Contains also configuration via web interface inside webapp. Tomcat 7.x or any Servlet2.5 container supported
- Added new value for decision status value – “revised”
- Added new supported mime types for decision documents: txt & html
- Added new synonyms for supported mime types: These match the RFC values for pdf/doc/html/txt/rtf/odt
- Explained CountryProfiles entity
- Made name property for Site localizable string instead of plain string
Version 1.3.2
- Added clarifications ‘treaties’ property of the Contact entity – clarified the odata structure of Treaty
Version 1.3.1
- Added clarifications for email field (only one email address per contact possible)
- Added clarifications for contact address field (to include country in address)
Version 1.3
- Decision ‘number’ and ‘published’ are mandatory
- Meeting ‘city’ and ‘country’ are mandatory
- firstName and lastName properties are no longer required (some conventions do not have names)
- Country reports ‘url’ is mandatory
- Added field ‘id’ to decision document to uniquely identify the file (for sync)
Version 1.2
- Added field primary to Contact entity which specifies that the contact is National Focal Point (1) or other type of contact (0)
Version 1.1
- Added new entity National Plan within the API specs
Version 1.0
- Added full set of unit tests for the example provider
- Cosmetic issues on code and API JavaDoc
Version 0.6
- Added new entity NationalPlan used for synchronization
- Changed Contact property treaty to treaties (one-to-many relation between Contact and Treaty).
- DecisionDocument property filename is required.
Version 0.5
- Initial version
Older versions (Deprecated)
| Date | Version | API document | JavaDoc | Downloads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 August 2011 | 1.3.4 | Download | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 27 July 2011 | 1.3.3 | Download | Browse | [Toolkit (18MB)] [Toolkit for JRun 4 (18MB)] [Source code] [JavaDoc] |
| 26 May 2011 | 1.3.2 | Download | Browse | Download |
| 17 May 2011 | 1.3.1 | Download | Browse | Download |
| 10 May 2011 | 1.3 | Download | Browse | Download |
| 12 April 2011 | 1.2 | Download | Browse | Download |
| 4 Apr 2011 | 1.1 | Download | Browse | Download |
| 1 Apr 2011 | 0.6 | - | Browse | Download |
| 1 Apr 2011 | 0.5 | Download | Browse | Download |
