April 2015 - API-users - lists.gbif.org

Few queries regarding downloaded occurrence.text data
by Priyank Tiwari 29 Apr '15

29 Apr '15

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 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 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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Re: [API-users] Occurrence search API limitations
by ptrans2004es 24 Apr '15

24 Apr '15

Hello, Thank you very much, Markus, for your answer. For me a callback URL is not really needed. Actively poll the download request status may be an acceptable solution as well. The problem is more in interactivity: as I understand, using asynchronous service does not allow us to show some kind of "progress" to the user, which seems to us convenient particularly on large downloads. Using synchronous paging service, we can show to the user the download progress. Maybe using the call /occurrence/download/{key} iteratively we could obtain some kind of "percent of completion" information, until the request is completed? (Sorry, I still don't tested the asynchronous service; only the synchronous one). Thank you very much. E. Garcia

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Occurrence search API limitations
by ptrans2004es 24 Apr '15

24 Apr '15

Hello, I know there is a limit of 200000 records when using the occurrence search API, and also that this limit can be avoided using the asynchronous download service instead. The problem is that this asynchronous service will send a link to a file to an email. That method seems not really convenient for programmatic downloads to be made from an interactive application, for example. There is another mechanism that allows downloading more than 200000 records? Removal of this limitation is expected? Thank you very much. Best regards, E.Gracia

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Parameter name changes?
by Scott Chamberlain 15 Apr '15

15 Apr '15

Hi again, Just noticed that spatialIssues parameter has bee changed to hasGeospatialIssue. But the documentation http://www.gbif.org/developer/occurrence#p_spatialIssues still has spatialIssues . Can the docs be updated? Are there any other parameters that have been changed but are not updated in the docs? Thanks! Scott Chamberlain

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Any changes in the download API?
by Scott Chamberlain 14 Apr '15

14 Apr '15

Hi all, Any news on the download API? More users of our R client are asking about this (e.g., "I want data for 15,000 species, and it takes sooo long with your R package, but using the web interface for so many species is a bit cumbersome"), so I am curious if you think it's now okay to expose download functions in our R client `rgbif`? If not, any idea when? If it is still a concern to allow programmatic access to the download API, I wonder if you can simply rate limit usage of the download API? Thanks! Scott

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Difference between /occurrence/search and /occurrence/count?
by Scott Chamberlain 10 Apr '15

10 Apr '15

Hi, A user of the R client we make for GBIF reports different number of occurrences for the /occurrence/search endpoint and the /occurrence/count endpoint with the same taxonkey, and limiting to georeferenced data only. See https://discuss.ropensci.org/t/rgbif-occ-count-and-occ-search-results-diffe… for the discussion. I imagine there's a good explanation for this, but I'm not sure what it is right now. Thanks! Scott

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