Hi Yan,

the way you describe is the current way to go. 
IPNI unfortunately has 2 problems you should be aware of. The dataset in GBIF is a somewhat outdated and has not been updated since 2009. We are working with Kew to publish a new version for a long time, but things progress very slowly.

The other issue is that IPNI really is 3 datasets combined all of which can cover the same name. You should therefore be prepared to find multiple ids for the same name - even on their current website. See http://www.ipni.org/about_the_index.html

For example Avena sativa gives 3 hits from IK, GCI & APNI: http://www.ipni.org/ipni/simplePlantNameSearch.do?find_wholeName=Avena+sativa&output_format=normal&query_type=by_query&back_page=query_ipni.html

In the future we would like to add a scientificNameID property to the GBIF backbone taxa and populate that with IPNI, IF or ZooBank ids. But that is not available so far.

Best,
Markus

On 22 Feb 2017, at 12:03, Yan Wong <yan@pixie.org.uk> wrote:

Hi

I have a large number of GBIF ids (~ 2 million), for which I wish to know any existing International Plant Names Index IDs (IPNI s). What’s the easiest way to do this? I can use the standard API, e.g.

http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/2705290/related

for 2705290 = Avena sativa, which gives me an output that contains several IPNIs (in this case, 164949-3, 391732-1, 27200-2, of which the number 391732-1 seems to be the canonical one, although I can’t figure out how to identify it as such from the GBIF API output)

It will obviously be tedious (and unwarranted) to make 2 million API calls. What’s the recommended way to do this?

Yan
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