[API-users] GBIF taxon page URLs by scientific name?

Ken-ichi kenichi.ueda at gmail.com
Sat Jul 19 21:52:02 CEST 2014


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 at 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 at 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 at lists.gbif.org
>> http://lists.gbif.org/mailman/listinfo/api-users
>>
>


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