Thursday, August 30, 2007

Maps, and a Google tweak


Today I stumbled across the Species Distribution Widget from GBIF (written by Tim Robertson and Dave Martin). For Mac OS X 10.4 users, this provides a cool way to quickly get a distribution map for a taxon. Given that Apple dashboard widgets are essentially Javascript and HTML, it occurred to me to reverse engineer the widget to see what it did. To open the widget you just "Ctrl-click" on the widget icon, select Show Package Contents, and the contents open in a Finder window.



The guts of the widget is in the scripts folder. This contains a Javascript file. The widget calls the URL http://data.gbif.org/species/taxonName/ajax/returnType/concept /view/ajaxMapUrls/provider/1/?query=, to which is appended the taxon name you are searching for. Back comes the result in XML. For example, searching for Apus apus returns:
<taxons>
<taxon>
<name>Apus apus</name>
<commonName>Common swift</commonName>
<key>13836131</key>
<url>species/13836131/overviewMap.png</url>
</taxon>
</taxons>

(Shouldn't "taxons" be "taxa"?) The URL of the corresponding map is given in the <url> tag. Append this to "http://data.gbif.org/, and you have the URL for the image of the map. For example, here's the map for Apus apus.


I've added code to do this to iSpecies, so it now features maps from from GBIF. I've also finally tweaked the Google code to stop mangling UTF-8 characters.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Rod,
Greetings from Copenhagen. We could say that we were feeling french the day we opted for "Taxons" but unfortunately it was just a global search and replace error. Now it is in use, we cant change it without breaking other peoples code.
Your iSpecies pages look really nice and if you have any ideas of how we can better expose data to you, then please get in touch. There is a web services API already in place exposing data in various forms.
Thanks for taking the time to look! On the way soon are full WMS mapping services...
Tim Robertson and Dave Martin (GBIF Developers)

Anonymous said...

Hmm I think it broke - I'm getting Apache Tomcat errors. Looking forward to the WMS though.

David Shorthouse said...

The folks at GBIF should consider expanding the use of this as Google webpage or desktop gadgets. Since you managed to deconstruct the js, a JSON output from GBIF would also be worthwhile for consumption on other web pages. That would most certainly speed up iSpecies' delivery.

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