Overview

A pure wrapper to a database written in PHP. It comes with a configuration web interface, documentation and is open source. A single installation (=provider) can host several resources which have their seperate, simple metadata, but share a common service endpoint (=URL). It was designed to work with Darwin Core style of exchange schemas (=federation schemas).

Installation

There are known problems using the DiGIR provider with PHP 5.x versions so the recommendation is to use it only with PHP 4.x.

The downloaded archive comes with documentation. Following the DiGIR Provider Manual (doc/prov_manual.html ) from 2003 initial installation is straight forward with PHP4 (only file permission needed to be fixed). With PHP5 on OSX 10.5 the apple provided installation and MAMP doesnt work [Apache/2.x  PHP/5.2.5]. It crashes PHP and seems to be a PHP bug.

Discussion

DiGIR is limited to work with flat tables like darwin core records. Exchanging more complex data like related taxa (TCS) or specimen with multiple identifications is not possible. Other than that DiGIR along with DarwinCore is a stable system. There is no dedicated maintainance anymore though and developments have been focused on TapirLite instead, so problems like the above with PHP5 are likely to grow. Therefore GBIF recommends new providers to use TapirLink or BioCASe instead.