Not a GBIF staffer, just chiming in with my 2c:

1) There should be a taxonKey value in occurence results, which should map to the key value in the species API (which should, probably, always be non-null). If the taxonRank in the occurence is equal to SPECIES, this should be a species record as well (it might be identified only to genus, or it might be identifier below species).

2 & 3) EOL is a good source for both vernacular names, and high quality images of specimens. They also have a pretty decent API: http://eol.org/api
You can use the search api ( http://eol.org/api/docs/search ) to query for the pageID of the taxon you're interested in, then use the pages api ( http://eol.org/api/docs/pages ) to pull the list of vernacular names and some media

Alex Thompson
iDigBio Infrastructure Team

On 04/28/2015 08:56 AM, Priyank Tiwari wrote:

Hi All,

I am currently trying to display the GBIF data in a format which is currently not supported by the GBIF API. For exmaple, displaying the list of species within few KM radius from a specific location ordered by species occurrence count.

To accomplish this, I decided to use the occurrence download API to fetch the data for all the required regions, store it in a database and query as per my requirement. I decided to go with following 2 simple tables in the database, 

1. Species - stores species related data like scientific name, vernacular names, representative image url, etc
   
2. Occurences - stores occurence related data like eventDate, gbifid, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, etc

After having a quick look at the downloaded occurrences.txt file, following queries came to my mind,

1. What should be my primary key for species table? I see 'speciesKey' column as a candidate, but it is set as null for some species. The occurrence record has a scientific name but no speciesKey. Any suggestions on this? What field I can use as unique identifier for species?

2. Vernacular names are missing for almost all the occurrences. Is there any API by which I can also obtain vernacular names for a species? http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/{int}/vernacularNames seems to do the job, but what is {int} (speciesKey?) and how do I get it from occurrence data?

3. I also need few representative images of the species. http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/{int}/media seems to do the job, but it returns a large image and I am looking for a small thumbnail image. Any way to accomplish this? Also, any API that can provide me both the vernacular names and imge url in single API call?

Thanks,

Priyank

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