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

geometry string length
by Scott Chamberlain 31 Mar '15

31 Mar '15

Hi all, Any known way to get around the URI string length for GET requests to the `/occurrence/search` endpoint? E.g., are POST requests supported for passing in parameters? I ask because a user of an R client I work on wants to pass in a polygon that is 40K characters long. Of course precision could be reduced, so the string is shorter, but that doesn't seem ideal. Also not ideal is converting to a bounding box approach that approximates the polygon, then converting that to WKT. Any thoughts? I know it's not standard, but maybe you allow body to be passed to a GET request for `/occurrence/search`? Thanks! Scott

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interaction for the maps api
by Ken-ichi 19 Mar '15

19 Mar '15

Hi all, We just added GBIF tiles as an optional overlay to many of our maps at iNaturalist.org, e.g. http://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/27818-Taricha-torosa/map. They're great and the API works perfectly, but the first thing people want to do when they see this data is click on those points! Has anyone at GBIF or elsewhere given some thought to how to implement that? The easiest way to do this from our perspective would be for GBIF to implement a UTFGrid endpoint for their tiles (https://github.com/mapbox/utfgrid-spec). The corresponding JSON wouldn't have to include all the occurrences (which would probably be a lot) but it could include 1 page of occurrences, or just a bounding box clients could use to generate a link to retrieve the corresponding data on GBIF. Another method I was thinking about was to make a custom tile overlay composed of HTML canvas elements, load the tile image onto the canvas, and use clicks to get the RGBA values of the corresponding pixel at the click coordinates to see if there was any color there. If alpha == 1, then retrieve corresponding occurrences from the GBIF occurrences API using the bounding box implied by the pixel at that zoom level. Canvases have been used as overlays in Google Maps, at least (e.g. https://github.com/brendankenny/CanvasLayer), and I'm sure in other frontend map frameworks as well, but I'm not sure what the performance would be like. Other ideas? -ken-ichi

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A question about the Maps API
by Mauro Cavalcanti 19 Mar '15

19 Mar '15

Dear ALL, Before the implementation of the new GBIF Portal, it was possible to generate distribution maps for a given species using an API call as follows: http://data.gbif.org/species/taxonName/ajax/returnType/concept/view/ajaxMap… where the value of the "query parameter" was a species name. This API call has been used by Roderick Page in his "iSpecies" web biodiversity data aggregator, as well as in my own "eSpecies" (sort of a clone of Page's iSpecies, written in Python, see sourceforge.net/projects/especies). Unfortunately, with the new GBIF Portal is seems that all API calls have changed and I got lost attempting to find out how to reproduce the previous behaviour using the new API. I presume it is still possible to generate distribution maps with the new API, but could not find out how. Can anyone offer some hints? Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide. With warmest regards, -- Dr. Mauro J. Cavalcanti E-mail: maurobio(a)gmail.com Web: http://sites.google.com/site/maurobio

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