1. Loading Records Through the Registry’s REST Interface
Ray Plante
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
NIST Software Development Team:
Mary Brady, Alden Dima, Guillaume Sousa Amaral, Ben Long, Pierre Francois Rigodiat, Xavier Schmitt, Sharief Youssef

2. Why use the REST Interface?
You have more than a few records you would like to publish
You have the metadata describing your data assets already stored in a local data management system
You wish to programmatically to convert that metadata into the format appropriate for loading into the registry.
You want to automatically update or create resource descriptions as you holdings evolve
5 April 2017
RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona

3. Overview of the Process
Create a login account with the registry
Create a script to format resource metadata into XML
using the resource description XML Schema used by the registry
Validate that the generated records comply with the schema
Upload each record into the registry through its REST interface
Use our Python client module
Review the records through web browser interface; make any desired changes
Publish the results
Makes them discoverable to the search interface
Records are shared with other registries through the harvesting interface
5 April 2017
RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona

4. Documentation and tools
Will post tutorial documentation and pointers to tools to WG RDA web page
rd-alliance.org -> Groups -> Working Groups -> Materials Resource Registries
How-to
XML Schema, example records
XML validater
Python Client (script and library)
5 April 2017
RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona

5. RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona
XML Schema
Schema is available from GitHub
github.com/usnistgov/mgi-resmd
Master branch = aspirational, standards-oriented, extensible
Branch feb2017 contains version currently in use
schemas/xml/res-md.xsd
Example records: examples/xml
XML Validation
If you work with XML, you probably already have a tool that validates XML against a schema
If not, try Junx
github.com/RayPlante/junx – a library of XML utilities that includes a Schema validater
Based Java Xerxes validating parser
Type: validate –S schemaLocation.txt yourfile.xml
schemaLocation.txt gives the location of the res-md.xml on your local disk
5 April 2017
RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona

6. The Registry’s REST Interface
See /docs/api
5 April 2017
RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona

7. Using the curate operation
Inputs
title – a unique name to give to the record
schema – internal id for the resource type
Available from the /rest/templates/select/all operation
For public registry at NIST, we will include these in the documentation
Bake the look-up into the Python client
content – XML text of the record as a string
POST as form-encoded parameters
Use username, password authentication
curl –F title=myfile –F schema= 58e3b0febd2a3d29d –F ‘content=<myfile.xml’ \
--user mylogin
5 April 2017
RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona

8. RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona
Using a Python client
(Registry is based on the Materials Data Curation System application)
Zachary Trautt’s MDCS-api-tools: a general Python client for MDCS
Provides a Python library and command line script for more easily working with the REST interface:
At GitHub: github.com/MDCS-community/MDCS-api-tools
Will be posting a branch for specifically interacting with Registry
Don’t need to know IDs or indicate the type of resource
registry-api -u mylogin –url –curate myfile.xml
5 April 2017
RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona

9. Check results through the browser
Browse your unpublished records through the Dashboard
5 April 2017
RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona

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Click “Publish”
At the moment, it’s not possible to ”publish” from the REST API
5 April 2017
RDA Plenary 9 -- Barcelona