Taxon Names Resolver: http://resolver.globalnames.org/
An overview by Christian for the MDB project, transfered and updated by Peter
| GBIF | Open Tree of Life | WikiData | Catalogue of Life | ITIS | NCBI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| no. of species | 2.5 million | 2.3 million | 2.1 million | 1.6 million | 374.000 | |
| no. of taxa | 5.3 million | 724,000 | 506.000 | |||
| sources | 60% Catalogue of Life 40% 50 other sources | Mainly NCBI, GBIF and IRMNG, other smaller data bases | All items in wikidata describing a taxon. Numerous bots. | 158 data bases | ||
| API | rest api | rest api | SPARQL | web service | Web service (wsdl) | Web site |
| Download | Darwin Core Archive | Collection of csv files | - | - | MySQL, Postgres and others | bcp-like dump files (Microsoft) |
| Last update | 8/2016 | 9/2016continuously | continously | 10/2016 | 9/2016 | 2016 |
| example | http://api.gbif.org/v1/species/5231190 | https://tree.opentreeoflife.org/opentree/argus/opentree7.0@ott93302 | http://tinyurl.com/jnoqoep | http://www.catalogueoflife.org/col/webservice?name=Platalea+leucorodia | https://www.itis.gov/ | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?name=drosophila+miranda |
The GBIF Taxonomic Backbone provides the best coverage of taxa, ensures high data quality and frequent updates. However wiki data has a superior language management and valuable additional data. For the benefit of the MDB users these data should be combined.
This can be easily achieved with two queries to the public apis of both providers, linked by the GBIF id.
Example “Wattwurm”:
Both entries are linked by the GIBIF ID 5197443.