Issue 11959
Expose Taxon instead of NameUsage
11959
Reporter: mdoering
Type: Improvement
Summary: Expose Taxon instead of NameUsage
Priority: Major
Resolution: Fixed
Status: Resolved
Created: 2012-10-01 12:07:04.156
Updated: 2014-05-01 10:46:10.536
Resolved: 2014-01-14 10:53:29.19
Description: The term "name usage" is still a new thing to the community and people dont understand it right away. A term like "taxon is readily understood though.
We used name usage because a) dwc uses it and b) to avoid the overloaded taxon term which people usually associate with an accepted taxon only, never synonyms.
Nevertheless we also use /species as the portal url as we felt name_usage is too strange for the public.
A refactoring to use Taxon instad of NameUsage should be considered.
Affected parts of the api would be:
- NameUsage.java --> Taxon.java
- /portal-webapp/species --> /portal-webapp/taxon
- api.gbif.org/dev/name_usage --> api.gbif.org/dev/taxon
- api.gbif.org/dev/match_nub API url --> api.gbif.org/dev/lookup/taxon
Another irritating name to the public is the use of nubKey in Occurrence and NameUsage. We might consider renaming it into gbifTaxonKey. Just taxonKey alone feels wrong as it only ever refers to the nub taxa and having Taxon.taxonKey not being a primary key but a pointer to other taxa also feels to unspecific.]]>
Author: trobertson@gbif.org
Created: 2012-10-01 12:15:03.002
Updated: 2012-10-01 12:15:03.002
In this discussion, we should consider the use of the term "nub" as well. Nub was never meant to be an externally used term, and was originally used only for foreign keys in databases to keep syntax short. Nub is the internal word for the GBIF backbone taxonomy.
Where nub is used, possible replacements would be gbifTaxonKey or simply taxonKey to replace nubKey.
The motivation is to make it as intuitive as possible for external devs. E.g. :
# datasets known to have the given species:
http://api.gbif.org/v1/dataset/search?taxonKey=123