May 2021 - COL-Users - lists.gbif.org

New monthly edition April 2021 live
by Markus Döring 24 Mar '22

24 Mar '22

Dear COL users, we are happy to announce that we have finally started again to publish monthly releases of the Catalogue of Life. The latest early April 2021 edition is not public on the main portal and available in the API. As this is the first time we have reissued our new identifiers, we have also taken some time to write a small post about stable identifiers in COL which I hope is informative and worth a read: https://www.catalogueoflife.org/2021/04/14/stable-ids Best wishes, Markus & the entire COL team +++ COL RESOURCES +++ COL Website: http://www.catalogueoflife.org/ COL ChecklistBank: http://data.catalogueoflife.org/ COL ChecklistBank API: http://api.catalogueoflife.org/ COL latest release in API: http://api.catalogueoflife.org/dataset/3LR

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API Introduction
by Markus Döring 24 Feb '22

24 Feb '22

Dear all, as you all know at the end of last year the Catalogue of Life has moved to a whole new infrastructure and now offers a new and richer API. As I had a few similar requests vie email lately I thought it would be good to give you a quick introduction to get started, while we are still working on better documentation. The basic concept has changed in the sense that the API does not only expose the Catalogue of Life (COL), but all of ChecklistBank (CLB) which hosts a large number of taxonomic or nomenclatural datasets including the sources that we use to assemble the COL. You can read here more about it: https://www.catalogueoflife.org/about/colpipeline The base URL of the API uses Swagger to exposes a rudimentary documentation of all the available REST resources and allows you to test it with real data: https://api.catalogueoflife.org In order to access the latest version of COL you need to use the datasetKey=3LR (note that the swagger generated API docs do not allow strings, please use the currents release key 2242 for testing or curl). Pretty much all calls of interest to you should be scoped under http://api.catalogueoflife.org/dataset/3LR In order to search for a name you could be doing this: http://api.catalogueoflife.org/dataset/3LR/nameusage/search?q=Abies&rank=SP… To get taxon details for a given taxonID this does most of it: Basics: http://api.catalogueoflife.org/dataset/2242/taxon/5QQJ9 Full Infos: http://api.catalogueoflife.org/dataset/2242/taxon/5QQJ9/info To browse the tree you can use the Tree API which in its basic form works like this: Root taxa: http://api.catalogueoflife.org/dataset/3LR/tree Plant Children: http://api.catalogueoflife.org/dataset/3LR/tree/P/children<http://api.catalogueoflife.org/dataset/3LR/tree/P> We now also offer reusable React UI components that you can embed in your own site or application to browse the tree, search and present species pages: https://github.com/CatalogueOfLife/portal-components We have also migrated the previous "legacy" API which you can access with the latest data from https://api.catalogueoflife.org/col/webservice<https://api.catalogueoflife.org/col/webservice?name=Abies%20alba&format=jso…> like this: https://api.catalogueoflife.org/col/webservice?name=Abies%20alba&format=jso… There are a few small differences how we treat references compared to the previous version, otherwise it should work just as before. We do consider this a legacy API and would like to encourage everyone using it still to migrate to our new API above. Please don't hesitate to ask any questions on this list if you want to know more on how to use our API. With best wishes, Markus +++ COL RESOURCES +++ COL Website: http://www.catalogueoflife.org/ COL ChecklistBank: http://data.catalogueoflife.org/ COL ChecklistBank API: http://api.catalogueoflife.org/ COL latest release in API: http://api.catalogueoflife.org/dataset/3LR -- Markus Döring Lead Developer Catalogue of Life Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) mdoering(a)gbif.org<mailto:mdoering@gbif.org> http://www.gbif.org<http://www.gbif.org/>

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Re: [COL-Users] COL downloads changes
by Markus Döring 13 May '21

13 May '21

Dear Scott, I must have missed your email in march, sorry for that. Let me still answer your important questions about the monthly downloads. COL aims to produce a monthly release which we will keep at least for a year accessible via the API with all its features. Each release has its distinct datasetKey in ChecklistBank. There is no fixed day when we will issue the release. Moving to the new infrastructure at the end of last year caused a few teething issues which made us skip a few releases in january/february for example. We hope this will not happen again and you should see now regular monthly updates. One of these releases will be tagged as an Annual release which from the API point of view is just the same as a monthly one. But it will not be removed from ChecklistBank and therefore you have long term access via the API to it. We plan to issue the next annual release in June. Once a monthly release is deleted, we will still keep the data in various formats for download. But it will be gone from the database. The download archive contains a DwC archive (YYYY-MM-DD_dwca.zip) and an ACEF archive (YYYY-MM-DD_acef.zip) right now, with the next May release we will also add a new ColDP archive to the supported formats. A native postgres dump is on our list too, but that is not straight forward as COL is just a small part of ChecklistBank and we will need to filter out the relevant bits. Prior to December 2020 we only had DwC archives, but these has used some slightly different terms than we use today. Note that we do not export a flattened classification (family, order, etc) at this stage, but we plan to add that back in again in a not too distant future. The same applies also to ColDP. The ACEF archive is slightly special. We used it to transfer the data to the old systems and uses \N to represent NULL, which is a postgres specific convention. The files are proper CSV files with a header row and not tab separated. There is a short SQL script to load the ACEF files into a postgres database which also has DDL: https://github.com/CatalogueOfLife/backend/blob/master/webservice/src/main/… The DwCA and ColDP archives on the other hand use just an empty string and also use a header row with the term names. Files in both dwca and coldp are tab delimited and use the .tsv file extension. For ColDP we maintain a Postgres, MS Access and Excel schema, but that needs some small updates as we are about to freeze the format for a final & fixed 1st version. Hope thats useful, Markus Hi, I had been using the downloads available at https://download.catalogueoflife.org/col/monthly/ to construct a SQLite version of the database here https://github.com/sckott/col-sql to make it easier for users to use. Two questions, the 2nd with many parts: 1. Will https://download.catalogueoflife.org/col/monthly/ continue to be updated every 2 or 3 months with a new database dump? 2. If the answer to (1) is yes: The format changed in the last database dump "2020-12-01_acef.zip". a. The included file names changed, and file types changed from .tsv to .csv (although the data still appears to be tab-sep). Was it intended to change to comma-sep? b. Will there be more changes to the monthly dump? c. Will the release cycle be something predictable? Every 2 or 3 months? d. The files have a lot of "\N" in them. Is this supposed to be a newline character? I've not seen a newline with a capital N. e. Any schema to use for these various csv files? Thanks! Scott Chamberlain

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