Design a FTP ingestion protocol

[Tian-Tan]

There are 2 ways to approach designing a FTP ingestion protocol:

1. Architect a new ingestion method that takes images directly from a directory and imports them into the system. This approach will take a long time as symbiota's ingestion code is long and distributed among many classes and files. It might be hard to understand the whole structure and build a new ingestion method in a short period of time.
2. Package the images into a dwc-Archive and use that DWCA file for ingestion. This method is preferred, as the images -> DWCA file pipeline can be built separately from the existing symbiota architecture, removing the need to build along the currently complicated ingestion code. The workflow can look like this:

• User FTPs a batch of images into a directory
• A script is run by a command like python3 script.py /directory -o outputFileName
• The output file is a DWCA, which can be used with symbiota's DWCA import function

While the basic workflow will look like above, some enhancements such as

• Adding a UI for the images -> DWCA conversion
• Integrating the images -> DWCA pipeline into the symbiota DWCA ingestion as an option

are also possible.

[Tian-Tan]

This issue has not been updated in a while, but the 2nd option is chosen and is currently in progress.

[Tian-Tan]

https://www.tdwg.org/standards/dwc/#maintenance-group%22%3E

More info on dwca is here.

[Tian-Tan]

It is unclear what the user wants to do with the images after creating a DWCA with them. For now, we can try to create file links or FTP links to the local user's machine when filling the images metadata for the DWCA.