Blog

I've been working on a new module to manage extensions to the new Darwin Core schema so that the IPT can serve data using these extensions. I've used CCK to define the content types and deal with all the CRUD rather than wroting bespoke code to do this. The main reason for this is it means that I get all sorts of stuff for free such as views integration. versioning, flexibility etc. There are two content types for the extension module - one defining an extension, and another defining the properties held within the extension. You can view the extensions by going to http://vocabularies.gbif.org/extensions.

I've stuck a copy of the generated table below.

Field	Content
Image

I have spent a few days writing a Drupal theme for this site which matches the GBIF theme. It was actually very straightforward to do and also very rewarding as there's a distinct target to achieve. I have based the theme on the IPT theme which conveniently has a nice css framework so it's easy to replicate. If you'd like to see the source of the IPT theme, it's at http://code.google.com/p/gbif-providertoolkit/source/browse/#svn/trunk/g...

There have been a number of changes and enhancements to the services on this site. We now have a service which lists the vocabularies being managed through this site and being managed by it:

http://vocabularies.gbif.org/services/gbif/vocabularies/

You may notice this is a short list - we are working on moving a number of other taxonomically focussed vocabularies into the site to really make it useful - for the full list see:

http://gnapartnership.org/gbif-scratchpads/ticket/82

For each of the vocabularies you can now:

As this site deals with multilingual content, we have had a number of comments saying that people can't read read some of the script on the pages. This is the result of not having the correct fonts installed on your machine. Where possible I have been trying to keep track of sources of fonts for download, and these are linked to on the following page: http://gbif.myspecies.info/help/fonts/sources
If any of these do not work or if you find any additional fonts that are useful please use the comment form at the bottom of this page.

This page contains example links to various pages within the site so you can easily get an example of the scope of the data and the web services associated with this site. If you would like to know more please contact Kehan Harman.

• Country: Bolivia
• Language: French
• Rank: Genus

Web service queries:

Thinking about this problem a little further, I've come up with an idea that may well scale to all data that we may like to serve in a similar way to this.

Basically, we have for each data type (language; rank; country) an entry, this entry can be either the "standard", or an alternative. If it is the standard, then it is marked as so, if it is the alternative, then it will contain a pointer to the standard.

As of today (11/12/07) I have the complete Language data (ISO-693-3) loaded into the site, along with the Country Code data (ISO-3166-?) which will be updated to the very latest ISO-3166-3 shortly

You can already get some basic information regarding languages with a few simple URLs:

• http://gbif.myspecies.info/gbif/lang/langid/eee Retrieves all the languages specified under the Language ID "eee". The definitive language for that ID will be marked with a final "L".
• http://gbif.myspecies.info/gbif/lang/name/wusehua Retrieves the language details for "Wusehua", and also the defined language that it is derived from

How are these URLs? composed?

Using the second example above, the URL has five main parts:

1. gbif.myspecies.info

   Simply the domain name where the service is made available. Any other Scratchpad domain could host a similar service to this

2. gbif

   A defined string used so that we know we're dealing with a query our SDP service

3. lang

   The data type to query. Only 'lang' is supported currently, however 'country', and 'rank' will be added soon

4. name

   The field to perform the search on.

5. wusehua

   The term being searched (simply user input)