Share your EOLv3 Use Cases: What are you trying to do on EOL?

The EOL team is interested in hearing about what you are looking for and/or trying to accomplish on EOL. Please feel free to share your personal and professional “use cases” in this thread. We will use this information to improve the support scaffolding on the site and to prioritize new development.

Thanks for asking! I’m a programmer, teacher at Montgomery College (web dev), nature lover/gardener/photographer-for-fun and have been involved with Rockville Science Center and the Rockville Environment Commission. I’d love to someday combine all of those interests and create an open source project involving cataloging photos & comments about local flora and fauna, and using it as a teaching tool and community project. I heard you (Bob) talking about an EOL API at a talk you gave a few months back and thought how wonderful it would be to be able to identify the species of whatever is in those photos and include a link to the right entry in EOL so people could find out more from a wider community. But writing this out, maybe I’m approaching it backwards and the API should be used to add the photos to EOL instead of creating a separate local database, or maybe both… Anyway, that is my rambling answer to “What are you trying to do on EOL?”

1 Like

Hi, I used EOL to cross check plant taxonomies from various historic resources and digitially capture groups of plant, animals, and insects taxonmies for further use in outputs with Inaturalist for quick reference guides or identifcation guides specifically to honey bee plant fodder, pests and other useful plants and animals to their habitat or ethnobotanical use.

Also I add additional common names in various languages as found in my various research and travel.

Working with other groups I hope to teach them how easy it is to make collections (i.e. plant or bird surveys of a particular place) to share with other parties in a easy and concise way, rather than a stagnet excel or word docuement.

1 Like

I am trying to figure out how to make an API call to use a common name to look up scientific names, limited to BIRDS (Aves). I feel like I am banging my head against a wall because in the old forum I see people limiting searches in similar ways but I just have not been able to figure it out.

The purpose is as a demo project to allow people to make personal logs of their own bird sightings, and also to look up more information about a particular bird to confirm that the bird they saw is the species they thought it was.

Hello, mjblauvelt! Thanks for reporting the hairiness of this. Please let me know if the following example is helpful:

http://eol.org/api/search/1.0.json?q=American+Robin&page=1&exact=true&filter_by_taxon_concept_id=695

Standing by,

Jen

I am a frequent API user. I use them to construct my own taxonomy database for the website that I’m running for academic purposes. What I wish for EOLv3 is ways to add common names to a taxon via API. In EOLv2, you have to login to the site and navigate to common name page then post the form by hand. I have added more than 10,000 names so far by this method but I can work a lot faster if there was an API for it. Please consider it.

On a separate topic, I would like to refer to one definitive taxonomic hierarchy rather than several different ones. Some hierarchies on EOLv2 are utterly incomplete and useless.

EOLv3 beta has EOL Dynamic Hierarchy. This looks promising. How many species does this hierarchy have at this moment? I want this tree to have at least 3 million species records. Let’s make this one definitive taxonomic hierarchy.

2 Likes

The current version of the EOL Dynamic Hierarchy has 2.2 million species. There will be a new version out soon, but it won’t have 3 million species. There are several speciose groups where no good taxonomy sources are available.

2 Likes

Thanks. on the related topic, what is dynamic about EOL Dynamic Hierarchy?

Does it mean this tree can change and grow in the future?

1 Like

Yes, we are planning to update the hierarchy continuously, adding new taxa, revising the tree structure, and fixing problems based on community feedback.

2 Likes

Hello everyone,

In my case, I have a list of wikidata identifiers (URIs) for a small set of species (1000 distinct aprox) and I would like to enrich the set with EOL data that can’t be queried through Wikidata SPARQL service. Specifically, I want the get the URIs of the objects that my species are linked to by the use of certain properties like, for example, the following ones:

  • habitat (property → rs.tdwg. org/dwc/terms/habitat)

  • realm (property → purl.obolibrary. org/obo/GAZ_00000071)

  • geographic dist (property → eol. org/schema/terms/Present)

I’ve tried by using the classic API, but fetched .jsons do not include that kind of data and I have no access to the Cypher API (recently requested) yet.

Therefore, now I’m wondering if I could use eol.org / terms / to somehow retrieve those objects, but I’m struggling to understand which parameters it accepts and if there is the possibility to directly fetch for json or xml data. I already tried the TSV download option but in this way it is quite hard to automate this “simple” task.

Any recommendation would be appreciated.
Regards!

Ethnobotany and ethnobiology. After reading Food, Genes, and Culture by Gary Paul Nabhan, I got really curious about what my own ancestors ate and what kinds of species they were around. I was really disappointed to see a huge lack of info around their environment. The ecoregion didn’t even have a wikipedia page! So I made a page and have been doing a lot of research into it ever since. A lot of what has been published about it is in a language I don’t understand but EOL has been a huge help. I hope you get to expand the traitbank to plants soon tho

Our final goal is to publish a dataset of vertebrates traits and, following best practices, we would like to link trait terms to ontological concepts (via their URIs). After some quite unsuccessful experiments with BioPortal search engine, I found the EOL glossary and thought maybe the API had some functionalities for mapping traits description to concepts. I ended up downloading the full glossary of terms and used some fuzzy string matching to find best matching concepts.

Common names are often a problem. Adding them to wikidata and use them or adding to EOL and use them. Hope there will come a solution for this.

the last date i see is in 2017, have there been no recent posts ?

now I see 2020,no visitors in 2021?

No one at all in 2021! 24 new users, 6 new posts in all that time…

Hello–I am a media-studies scholar at the University of Maryland writing a book about the encyclopedia form in the domain of moving-image media. I have been researching the Encyclopaedia Cinematographica, a West German project that created films from the early 1950s into the 1990s. That project is now defunct, but many of the films have been preserved and digitized by the Technische Informationsbibliothek (German National Library of Science and Technology aka TIB) in Hannover, Germany.

One of the premises of the EC project was that the films it created were supposed to be lasting records of animal movements and behaviors. So I would like to see how well these films hold up by connecting them to the EoL.

There are currently 539 life-science films from the EC in the TIB’s online collection; there are another 346 that are in the “offline” collection.
Here’s an example: Triops cancriformis (Phyllopoda)–Bewegungsweisen (Otto Koenig, 1965)

Any advice about how to proceed with this idea would be appreciated!

Hi Bob I am not certain what I am trying to accomplish other than I am becoming increasingly aware and concerned about of the loss of biodiversity. It will probably not bother me a lot as I am 75, never mind my children etc, but it hurts just to see the mess the planet is in. I admit I never cared much in the past, to busy building a business (at any cost), but given my age I remember, not that long ago, when birds sang everywhere and I had to scrape the insects of my windscreen and lights on a regular basis. No longer, I recently planted 30,000 broad leaf native trees on some land we have and I was walking through it in the summer and it was deadly quiet, no birds singing and no insects humming, at least very few. I just don’t understand why the world can’t wake up and smell the roses (before there are none) They don’t need scientists or David Attenborough to tell them, it all in front of their eyes. Even 1000’s of years ago the Greeks knew better “Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in” Greek Proverb. I guess I feel powerless, with not enough time left to make a difference.

Bonjour,
Je souhaite agrandir mes connaissances sur les désignations des occupants de la planète, avec leurs passés présents et futurs supposés.
Cordialement
Marie Christine