Yup, we have the same issue at iNat, but it's still useful to perform scientific name-based URLs. For one thing it's enormously convenient for me to type in
http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/Rhus%20typhina
instead of searching for the correct taxon ID and going to http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/167829. I suppose it's even easier to search for "rhus typina gbif" in Google, but occasionally the top result is some kind of checklist view and not the main taxon page. For another thing, it lets partner sites like ours link to your content without have a priori knowledge of your internal identifiers. We really want to link to your taxon pages, but we really *don't* want to maintain a local list of *all* your identifiers that we have to keep synced.
In situations where there are multiple valid taxa with the same name, we redirect to our search page, e.g. http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/Cantharellus. You could also imagine rendering a custom response stating explicitly that there are multiple ways to resolve that name, e.g. with a "300 multiple options for the resource delivered" response.
In situations where there is a 1-to-1 correspondence between the requested name and a different, more recent synonym, we redirect to the most recent concept, e.g. http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/Hyla%20regilla
Also, while I'm not an SEO expert, I'm pretty sure having the taxon name in the URL will help boost the rank of your taxon pages in searches for scientific names (I'm also pretty sure having multiple URLs pointing to the same content is bad for SEO, so we at iNat should probably be more consistent about using 302 redirects to the canonical URLs).
On Sat, Jul 19, 2014 at 3:09 AM, Markus Döring mdoering@gbif.org wrote:
Hi Ken-ichi, the taxon page /species/{ID} is the one you should link to. We keep those identifiers stable and the (canonical) name alone is often a homonym and not guaranteed to be unique or even stable (we might correct typos for example).
best, Markus
On 18 Jul 2014, at 22:36, Ken-ichi kenichi.ueda@gmail.com wrote:
Is there a way to link to a scientific name on the new GBIF? The old one would (and still does) let you link to taxon pages like this
http://data.gbif.org/species/Rhus_typhina
but the new GBIF seems to require an identifier in the URL. I could just link to http://www.gbif.org/species/search?q=Rhus%20typhina, but I'd rather link directly to the taxon page. Possible? _______________________________________________ API-users mailing list API-users@lists.gbif.org http://lists.gbif.org/mailman/listinfo/api-users