For that subspecies we are lacking a vernacular name. As you have seen we have the vernacular name just for the species. It might be applicable for the subspecies in your case, but we do not retrieve that automatically.

The taxonKey can represent any backbone taxon of any rank up to kingom and down to forma. And as you have seen not all taxa do have a common name.

Markus

On 28 Apr 2015, at 16:48, Priyank Tiwari <priyankgt@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks Markus.

Let me take a quick example from the downloaded occurrences.txt

The occurrence record has gbifid = 1056676532, taxonKey = 6092438 and speciesKey = 2482473.
If we use http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/{int}/vernacularNames API with taxonKey = 6092438, then it gives 0 results (http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/6092438/vernacularNames), where as if we use speciesKey in the API, it gives proper results as I would like to display (http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/2482473/vernacularNames).

Will taxonKey be unique for every species or does it map to higher order species in the classification hierarchy?

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 7:10 PM, Markus Döring <mdoering@gbif.org> wrote:
Hi Priyank,

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?
taxonKey is the primary key, speciesKey points to the accepted species but your occurrence might be linked to a subspecies or even a synonym name

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?
As you said use the species API to get vernacular names. {int} is the taxonKey from the occurrence record. 212, birds in this case:
http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/212/vernacularNames

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?
I am afraid that does not exist. We use an image cache internally that produces thumbnails, but its not part of the public API.
We also do not have flagged just one image as the representative. And watch out for the media type, it can also be videos or sounds.

cheers,
Markus

Thanks,
Priyank

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~ Priyank