Taxonomy

Update on 2021-02-09: I’ve archived 8 more packages. Post below updated Code is often arranged in packages for any given language. Packages are often cataloged in a package registry of some kind: NPM for node, crates.io for Rust, etc. For R, that registry is either CRAN or Bioconductor (for the most part). CRAN has the concept of an archived package. That is, the namespace for a package (foo) is still in the registry (and can not be used again), but the package is archived - no longer gets updated and checks I think are no longer performed....

taxizedb arose from pain in using taxize when dealing with large amounts of data in a single request or doing a lot of requests of any data size. taxize works with remote data sources on the web, so there’s a number of issues that can slow the response down: internet speed, server response speed (was a response already cached or not; or do they even use caching), etc. The idea with taxizedb was to allow users to do the same things as taxize allows, but much faster by accessing the entire database for a data source on their own computer....

The first version of binomen is now up on CRAN. It provides various taxonomic classes for defining a single taxon, multiple taxa, and a taxonomic data.frame. It is designed as a companion to taxize, where you can get taxonomic data on taxonomic names from the web. The classes (S3): taxon taxonref taxonrefs binomial grouping (i.e., classification - used different term to avoid conflict with classification in taxize) For example, the binomial class is defined by a genus, epithet, authority, and optional full species name and canonical version....

I maintain, along with other awesome people, the taxize R package - a taxonomic toolbelt for R, for interacting with taxonomic data sources on the web. Taxonomy data is not standardized, but there are a lot of common elements, and there is a finite list of taxonomic ranks, and finite number of major taxonomic data sets. Thus, I’ve been interested in attempting to define a pseudo standard for expressing taxonomic data in R....

I’ve been working on a Python port of the R package taxize that I maintain. It’s still early days with this Python library, I’d love to know what people think. For example, I’m giving back Pandas DataFrame’s from most functions. Does this make sense? Installation sudo pip install git+git://github.com/sckott/pytaxize.git#egg=pytaxize Or git clone the repo down, and python setup.py build && python setup.py install Load library import pytaxize ITIS ping pytaxize.itis_ping() 'This is the ITIS Web Service, providing access to the data behind www....

A missed chat on the rOpenSci website the other day asked: Hi there, i am trying to use the taxize package and have a .csv file of species names to run through taxize updating them. What would be the code i would need to run to achieve this? One way to answer this is to talk about the basic approach to importing data, doing stuff to the data, then recombining data....

Eduard Szöcs and I started developing a taxonomic toolbelt for the R language a while back , which lets you interact with a multitude of taxonomic databases on the web. We have a paper in F1000Research if you want to find out more (see here). I thought it would be fun to rewrite some of taxize in other languages to learn more languages. Ruby and Python made the most sense to try....

UPDATE: there were some errors in the tests for taxize, so the binaries aren’t avaiable yet. You can install from source though, see below. Getting taxonomic information for the set of species you are studying can be a pain in the ass. You have to manually type, or paste in, your species one-by-one. Or, if you are lucky, there is a web service in which you can upload a list of species....

It can be a pain in the ass to get taxonomic names. For example, I sometimes need to get all the Class names for a set of species. This is a relatively easy problem using the ITIS API (example below). The much harder problem is getting all the taxonomic names downstream. ITIS doesn’t provide an API method for this - well, they do (getHirerachyDownFromTSN), but it only provides direct children (e....