Thursday, August 28, 2014

BioNames database can be downloaded

B8e253dc3be3d84f2c69c51b0af86c03 400x400My BioNames project has been going for over a year now, but I hadn't gotten around to providing bulk access to the data I've been collecting and cleaning. I've gone some way towards fixing this. You can now grab a snapshot of the BioNames database as a Darwin Core Archive here. This snapshot was generated on the 22nd August, so it is already a little out of date (BioNames is edited almost daily as I clean and annotate it when I should be doing other things).

The data dump doesn't capture all the information in the BioNames as I've tried to keep it simple, and Darwin Core is a bit of a pain to deal with. The actual database is in CouchDB which is (mostly) an absolute joy to work with. I replicate the database to Cloudant, which means there's a copy "in the cloud". A number of my other CouchDB projects are also in Cloudant, in the case of Australian Faunal Directory and BOL DNA Barcode Map the data is also served directly from Cloudant.