Selecting species from a certain kingdom

Hi Frank.
The plan is to connect the taxa in a hierarchy, with parents and children. So to get everything in Plantae you would start there and then follow the lower_classifications all the way down.

That makes sense, thanks. Would this be an expensive (slow?) query for the Freebase system?

Also sorry for the double post but will the 'Also known as' field contain a plant's common names from the ITIS data? I'm working on a web application to incorporate this data and because users search a lot by common name it would be very useful to have. Double thanks!

Can you give an example? Usually the common name (if known) is the topic title and the scientific name is in the Scientific Name field.

Frank, we dont expect the query to be slow, but as soon as we have the data loaded Ill try it out. Some databases (e.g. Species 2000 have a field which is the flattened complete hierarchy, which we could fall back to if we need it)

As for common names, I agree with Jeff that they should be the name field, and there is alias if we need it. Also ITIS has many names in Spanish, which I plan to import.

>>> Can you give an example? Usually the common name (if known) is the topic title and the scientific name is in the Scientific Name field. <<<

Sure. For example Crocus vernus ( http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/crocus_vernus ) has two common names, Dutch Crocus and Spring Crocus. If I have followed correctly the final format would be that one of the two common names would be the Name, 'Crocus vernus' is in the Scientific Name field and the remaining common name can be added as an alias?

>>> As for common names, I agree with Jeff that they should be the name field, and there is alias if we need it. Also ITIS has many names in Spanish, which I plan to import. <<<

Above all I was curious as to how common names would be handled because I didn't see a common name field per say. It never occurred to me that the Name field may be used :)

Thanks for the prompt reply guys.


Thanks for the prompt replies guys.

>>> Sure. For example Crocus vernus ( http://sandbox.freebase.com/view/crocus_vernus ) has two common names, Dutch Crocus and Spring Crocus. If I have followed correctly the final format would be that one of the two common names would be the Name, 'Crocus vernus' is in the Scientific Name field and the remaining common name can be added as an alias? <<<

That sounds right.

>>> Thanks for the prompt replies guys. <<<

Now that they've got the RSS feeds working, the discussion boards work a lot better.

For that specific example, Spring Crocus may be too generic. For example this database only has the other common name http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=CRVE4

Here's a better example http://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=34342 has 5 common names listed.

OK, let me look at the actual ITIS database and see if we can distinguish one as primary, which would allow the others to be aliases....

Well it turns out that they are not distinguished in ITIS. http://www.itis.gov/vernac.pdf

I propose that if the first name matches the Wikipedia name we leave it alone, and we load all the vernaculars as /common/topic/alias. For new topics from ITIS we use the first name, capitalize the first word and use the remainder (if any) as aliases.