Talk:IDigBio API

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Please feel free to make notes here if you find something is missing from the API documentation.

Thanks! - Dan Stoner


Endpoint Properties

 This section preserved here for the moment until the content can be re-integrated or willfully discarded. -dstoner 

The iDigBio API tries to follow the REST paradigm's HATEOAS (Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State) model, which basically means that within each API endpoint we provide a list of relevant links to further API actions. This list typically is stored in "idigbio:links"

Other system level property names include

For Entity Endpoints:

  • etag - the opaque identifier assigned to a specific version of a resource found at a URL
  • dateModified - The date the entity was modified
  • version - The entity's version number
  • type - The entity's type
  • uuid - The entity's uuid
  • siblings - Any siblings the entity may have as a dictionary of uuids
  • recordIds - A list of lookup keys for the entity
  • data - The entity's encapsulated data element

For Collection Endpoints:

  • items - the list of items in the collection
  • itemCount - the number of total items in the collection

Entity Data

 This section preserved here for the moment until the content can be re-integrated or willfully discarded. -dstoner 


Concepts

The data element for each entity can include any number of key-value pairs containing properties of the entity, including potentially values that are themselves lists or dictionaries. Typical key namespaces that might appear in each type are (in order of decreasing usefulness):

  • Records: typically contains Darwin Core elements ( http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm ) describing a physical specimen, may also contain custom elements or elements defined by other standards. See the complete list of terms here.
  • Mediarecords: typically contains Audubon Core elements ( http://terms.gbif.org/wiki/Audubon_Core_Term_List_(1.0_normative) ) describing a media capture event, may also contain custom elements or elements defined by other standards. See the complete list of terms here.
  • Publishers: A top level entity for the data ingestion process, each publisher contains metadata about a publishing location such as an IPT installation or Symbiota portal.
  • Recordsets: An entity largely derived from the publisher metadata. These serve as the join point between multiple data files for single collection, and all records and mediarecords in iDigBio are expected to be associated with a recordset that links them to a source.
  • All other entities exposed via the api are either internal only concepts with no fixed definition, or are unused.