Example of using the Global Names Resolver API to check species names

There are a number of options for resolution of taxonomic names. The Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (TNRS) comes to mind. There is a new service for taxonomic name resoultion called the Global Names Resolver. They describe the service thusly “Resolve lists of scientific names against known sources. This service parses incoming names, executes exact or fuzzy matching as required, and displays a confidence score for each match along with its identifier.”.

Load required packages

Just uncomment the code to use.

# If you don't have them already
# install.packages(c('RJSONIO','plyr','devtools')) require(devtools)
# install_github('taxize_','ropensci')
library(RJSONIO)
library(plyr)
library(taxize)

Get the data sources available

Get just id’s and names of sources in a data.frame

tail(gnr_datasources(todf = T))

##     id                                title
## 82 164                            BioLib.cz
## 83 165 Tropicos - Missouri Botanical Garden
## 84 166                                nlbif
## 85 167                                 IPNI
## 86 168              Index to Organism Names
## 87 169                        uBio NameBank

Give me the id for EOL (Encyclopedia of Life)

out <- gnr_datasources(todf = T)
out[out$title == "EOL", "id"]

## [1] 12

Fuzzy search for sources with the word “zoo”

out <- gnr_datasources(todf = T)
outdf <- out[agrep("zoo", out$title, ignore.case = T), ]
outdf[1:2, ]

##     id             title
## 20 100 Mushroom Observer
## 25 105           ZooKeys

Resolve some names

Search for Helianthus annuus and Homo sapiens, return a data.frame

gnr(names = c("Helianthus annuus", "Homo sapiens"), returndf = TRUE)[1:2, ]

##   data_source_id    submitted_name       name_string score    title
## 1              4 Helianthus annuus Helianthus annuus 0.988     NCBI
## 3             10 Helianthus annuus Helianthus annuus 0.988 Freebase

Search for the same species, with only using data source 12 (i.e., EOL)

gnr(names = c("Helianthus annuus", "Homo sapiens"), data_source_ids = "12", 
    returndf = TRUE)

##   data_source_id    submitted_name       name_string score title
## 1             12 Helianthus annuus Helianthus annuus 0.988   EOL
## 2             12      Homo sapiens      Homo sapiens 0.988   EOL

That’s it. Have fun! And put bugs/comments/etc. here.

Written in Markdown, with help from knitr, and nice knitr highlighting/etc. in in RStudio.

I prepared the markdown for this post by:

KnitPost <- function(input, base.url = "/") {
    require(knitr)
    opts_knit$set(base.url = base.url)
    fig.path <- paste0("img/", sub(".Rmd$", "", basename(input)), "/")
    opts_chunk$set(fig.path = fig.path)
    opts_chunk$set(fig.cap = "center")
    render_jekyll()
    knit(input, envir = parent.frame())
}
setwd("/path/to/_posts")
KnitPost("/path/to/postfile.Rmd")

from jfisher.