Hi Gabi,

Thanks for this. It is something that we have pondered a few times as a possible API we could offer, but not something we’ve heard a *really* strong call for.

One of the worries we have, is that if we offer a consistent API on “other peoples data” then we have to take responsibility for ensuring the data is as up-to-date as possible - this is partly why the real-time occurrence indexing has been so well received by publishers. Imagine the scenario where someone is blogging about a data issue, that is fixed in the <ChecklistX>, but GBIF are lagging behind by some days, weeks or months. The <ChecklistX> folks will rightly be disgruntled that they are being called on poor data which is inaccurate - we need to be a little careful about the responsibility (e.g. resources to support) we take on with those kind of service offerings.

We are re-working the checklist indexing due to be out this year so it will become near-real-time / on demand (within hours turnaround), and have a backlog of the backbone building issues to address. With those in place we could start considering including the kind of service for a handful of the key checklists later in 2015 (realistically), but I’d be wary of doing it before that is in place.

I should mention that if this were a service really desired for a project or so, and someone were willing to fund (or contribute) the development and deployment (e.g. we’d likely need a new blade as all this lives in memory) we could accelerate the work.

Does this help at all and sound reasonable?

Thanks for the feedback, Tim

On 14 Nov 2014, at 15:02, Dröge, Gabriele g.droege@BGBM.ORG wrote:

Hi GBIF team,

on your website (dev.gbif.org/wiki/display/POR/Webservice+API) I’ve found information that one can only do a name usage match to the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy. In theory one could also do it against the Catalogue of Life or other checklists, but this is currently unimplemented. This implementation would be very useful for GGBN (and I guess a lot of other projects too). It would be great to use this standard pipeline to send queries to different checklist instead of querying different web services, despite of the fact that most of the checklists in your repository are not available via web services yet.

Can you say something about the priority for this implementation or when you will realize it?

Best, Gabi _______________________________________________ API-users mailing list API-users@lists.gbif.org http://lists.gbif.org/mailman/listinfo/api-users