[Taxacom] iSpecies

[Roderic Page]

Hi David,

Yahoo is basically falling apart as a web service company as far as I can tell. GBIF has a nice, clean API, but rather strangely it lacks the ability to return a species distribution as such. Instead you get a bunch of points. In many ways I’d like to be bawl to do something like convert the points into a polygon (or set of polygons) to represent the range more elegantly. Alternatively, a heat map might be fun.

Any tool that relies on web services is going to face problems as those services change or go away. This is one reason my other projects have focussed on getting all the data and holding it locally so that they are much more robust to that problem.

Regards

Rod

On 26 Jan 2016, at 01:13, David Shorthouse <davidpshorthouse at gmail.com<mailto:davidpshorthouse at gmail.com>> wrote:

If it's merely to add a bit of levity to the list, I'm all for it.

Sometimes the doing is the only necessary philosophy, much like how
cell phones & texting have replaced planning to meet at a particular
time and place.

Anyhow, it's been 10 years. Why have some original data sources & APIs
evaporated (Yahoo) & has "search" improved for those that remain in
any measurable way (GBIF)?

David



On Jan 25, 2016, at 7:46 PM, Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com<mailto:tonyrees49 at gmail.com>> wrote:

Hi Rod,

Obviously there is a conceptual link from your original iSpecies to the
birth and continued development of EOL which is arguably the original
iSpecies concept extended a lot further, with links to multiple taxonomies,
wikipedia articles, maps from many sources, BHL etc. etc. So I'm not clear
why you would reactivate iSpecies unless it is to prototype some aspects
you feel EOL is not currently covering (or could not, with a few well
placed suggestions). So I guess I am more interested in the philosophy of
what you are doing than the current realization as per the web site (which
is easy to criticise versus e.g. the equivalent pages on EOL). More info,
please! (and yes, I did see the iPhylo blog post).

Regards - Tony

Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
https://about.me/TonyRees
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---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
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University of Glasgow
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