Closed mjwestgate closed 1 year ago
As of commit a0e0b2e504b6e21271018a555aee85a2ddb974c4, we now support name matching for all atlases that use GBIF taxonomy (currently Austria, Guatemala, Spain & Sweden). This effectively means we can remove the advise to use taxize
for this purpose from our documentation. What we can't do yet is query other GBIF APIs from galah
, which leaves open the question of what to do next. Basically we have two options:
galah
to retrieve record counts or occurrences from GBIFBased on my reading of the documentation here, there are a few points to consider in reaching a decision. For occurrence data:
show_all_values
/search_values
won't work unless we hard-code some entries. This is effectively the approach taken by e.g. rgbif::isocodes
galah_select
would be either be ignored or applied post-download (which is inefficient)For counts the same issues apply, plus a few more:
year
and basisOfRecord
), which limits usefulness of galah_group_by
, unless we write our own iteration codeoccurrence/search
API and adding &limit=0
. This would maintain equivalence between atlas_counts
and atlas_occurrences
, which is an important feature.In summary, while there is merit in supporting count and occurrence queries from GBIF; but the architecture is sufficiently different to make this somewhat challenging.
This is closed, with the caveat that different atlases perform differently, and GBIF not currently supported
As of v1.4.0,
galah
supports the ALA (default), and 5 other atlases (Austria, Guatemala, Spain, Sweden & UK). Although other atlases exist (see the full list), it is unclear whether these other atlases are unsupported because of technical issues, or because we simply haven't added them yet.In increasing order of difficulty, a useful set of activities to address this might include:
show_all_atlases()
, and record whether they can be called bygalah
atlas_counts
andatlas_occurrences
search_taxa
orsearch_identifiers
, rather than requiring the user to search usingtaxize
. This could work either by importingtaxize
, or by writing new codegalah
functions. This would requiregalah_filter
to support queries other thansolr
. We would also need to either callrgbif::occ
withinatlas_occurrences
to download the data, or write new code to achieve the same goal.