An LSID client

The last post was on how to build a resolver. This post is on how to build a client. The simple Perl client below retrieves metadata only (but I think it's fairly obvious which line needs to be changed to retrieve data ;-) )

Here we go!

use LS::ID;
use LS::Locator;

$lsid = LS::ID->new(
'urn:lsid:biomoby.org:servicetype:Retrieval:2001-09-21T16-00-00Z'
);

$locator = LS::Locator->new();
$authority = $locator->resolveAuthority($lsid);
$resource = $authority->getResource($lsid);
$data = $resource->getMetadata();
$response_filehandle = $data->response;
print <$response_filehandle>;
print "\n";

Voila! You hopefully have a bunch of RDF on your screen right now. Sure, that's a couple more lines than LWP::Simple, but some of that could be better encapsulated, so it really is only one or two lines more code than trying to do a GET... and with all sorts of benefits!

Oh! And here's how you get the LSID code from sourceforge. Get yourself a copy of Subversion, then cleck-out the code using subversion as so:

svn co http://lsids.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/lsids/trunk/lsid-perl lsids

(windows users will have a nice GUI for this)

Note that the sourceforge site indicates that it should be https://, but it works just as well as http, so you don't have to re-install Subversion to make it SSL compliant.