[API-users] Few queries regarding downloaded occurrence.text data

[Alex Thompson]

Not a GBIF staffer, just chiming in with my 2c:

1) There should be a taxonKey value in occurence results, which should 
map to the key value in the species API (which should, probably, always 
be non-null). If the taxonRank in the occurence is equal to SPECIES, 
this should be a species record as well (it might be identified only to 
genus, or it might be identifier below species).

2 & 3) EOL is a good source for both vernacular names, and high quality 
images of specimens. They also have a pretty decent API: http://eol.org/api
You can use the search api ( http://eol.org/api/docs/search ) to query 
for the pageID of the taxon you're interested in, then use the pages api 
( http://eol.org/api/docs/pages ) to pull the list of vernacular names 
and some media

Alex Thompson
iDigBio Infrastructure Team

On 04/28/2015 08:56 AM, Priyank Tiwari wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I am currently trying to display the GBIF data in a format which is 
> currently not supported by the GBIF API. For exmaple, displaying the 
> list of species within few KM radius from a specific location ordered 
> by species occurrence count.
>
> To accomplish this, I decided to use the occurrence download API to 
> fetch the data for all the required regions, store it in a database 
> and query as per my requirement. I decided to go with following 2 
> simple tables in the database,
>
>  1. *Species* - stores species related data like scientific name,
>     vernacular names, representative image url, etc
>  2. *Occurences* - stores occurence related data like eventDate,
>     gbifid, decimalLatitude, decimalLongitude, etc
>
> After having a quick look at the downloaded occurrences.txt file, 
> following queries came to my mind,
>
> 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?
>
> 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 
> <http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/%7Bint%7D/vernacularNames> seems to do 
> the job, but what is {int} (speciesKey?) and how do I get it from 
> occurrence data?
>
> 3. I also need few representative images of the species. 
> http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/{int}/media 
> <http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/%7Bint%7D/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?
>
> Thanks,
> Priyank
>
>
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