The Marine Taxonomic Comparison Tool

The Marine Taxonomic Comparison Tool is an application that utilizes data from both the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and Wikipedia. WoRMS is a wonderful and accurate resource, but it contains a lot of specific and esoteric information that may be a bit much for a casual marine biology enthusiast or young student. It also only allows you to examine one organism at a time, and does not allow for comparison. This application gleans and displays the most relevant taxonomic information from WoRMS in a way that is easy to understand, listing Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species, and displays with it a picture of the organism with an introductory blurb (both from Wikipedia). This tool also color-codes the taxonomic data, drawing the user’s eye to where in the family tree-of-life your two organisms diverge from each other.

To run the application, download the relevant libraries (listed below) using the pip package installer. Python 3 is needed to run the application.

Run program with command: python marine_taxo.py

Necessary Libraries:

• tkinter
• PIL
• requests
• json
• urllib.parse
• webbrowser Some installations may require a manual installation of the re library to run as well.

Run program with command: python marine_taxo.py

For image getting service:

Visit url: http://notforlong.net:5007/requestImage?name={} Place the thing you want an image of within the brackets. For example, if you want a picture of a cat, you will do: http://notforlong.net:5007/requestImage?name=cat Terms with multiple words can be given with spaces.

There are currently some limitations to this service:

1. This is a Wikipedia specific service. It can only retrieve images from corresponding wikipedia articles
2. This does not return the "main" image on the wikipedia page.
3. Error handling is still in progress and the service is not yet ready to return the correct output if there is no page or no images on the page available

Please let me know if you have any other concerns or issues with the service. Thank you!

For local use:

This is a python service that utilizes a number of additional libraries that will need to be installed (listed below). If you would like to run the code locally, you can install libaries from the command line: pip install You will need:

1. flask
2. wikipedia
3. requests
4. shutil

To use the service, run the python code with the command python imageService.py Then, from a browser window, enter http://localhost:81/requestImage?name={name of image} with {name of image} being the images you would like to use for your program. This is a string that can be taken with spaces. For example, entering: http://localhost:81/requestImage?name=grand canyon national park will yield http://localhost:81/requestImage?name=grand%20canyon%20national%20park

The return object is a JSON object containing a url to the image you requested. As with the above example: {"url":"http://localhost:81//static/grand_canyon_national_park.jpg"}