PygmyBrowse Classification Tree API

Yay, a new toy! This one ought to be useful for lots of biodiversity/taxonomic web sites. First, I'll let you play with it (click the image):

Seems I always pick up where Rod Page leaves off. Not sure if this is a good thing or not. However, we do have some worthwhile synergies. Rod has cleaned up and simplified his old (Sept. 2006) version of PygmyBrowse. Earlier this week, he made an iframe version and put it on his iPhylo blog. Like Rod, I dislike a lot of the classification trees you come across on biodiversity/taxonomic web sites because these ever-expanding monstrosities eventually fill the screen and are a complete mess. When you click a hyperlinked node, you often have to wait while the page reloads and the tree re-roots itself...not pretty. Trees are supposed to simplify navigation and give a sense of just how diverse life on earth really is. The Yahoo YUI TreeView is OK because it's dynamic, but it desperately needs to handle overflow for exceptionally large branches as is the case with classification trees in biology. What did I do that's different from Rod's creation?

I convinced Dave Martin (GBIF) to duplicate the XML structure Rod used to fill the branches in his PygmyBrowse and to also do the same with JSON outputs. This is the beta ClassificationSearchAPI, which will soon be available from the main GBIF web services offerings. When the service is out of beta, I'll just adjust one quick line in my code.

I jumped at the chance to preserve the functionality Rod has in his newly improved, traditional XMLHTTP-based PygmyBrowse and write one as an object-oriented JavaScript/JSON-based version. My goal is to have a very simple API for developers and end users who wish to have a remotely obtained, customizable classification tree on their websites. Plus, I want this API to accept an XML containing taxon name and URL elements (e.g. a Google sitemap) such that the API will parse it and adjust the behaviour of the links in the tree. In other words, just like you can point the Google Map API to an XML file containing geocoded points for pop-ups, I wanted to author this API to grab an XML and magically insert little, clickable icons next to nodes or leaves that have correspoding web pages on my server. Think of this as a hotplugged, ready-made classification naviagator. This is something you cannot do with an iframe version because it's stuck on the server and you can't stick your fingers in it and play with it. Sorry, Rod.

The ability to feed an XML to the tree isn't yet complete, but the guts are all in place in the JavaScript. You can specify a starting node (homonym issues haven't yet been dealt with but I'll do that at some point), the size of the tree, the classification system to use (e.g. Catalogue of Life: 2007 Annual Checklist or Index Fungorum, among others), and you can have as many of these trees on one page as you wish. You just have to pray GBIF servers don't collapse under the strain. So, you could use this API as a very simple way to eyeball 2+ simultaneous classifications. The caveat of course is that GBIF must make these available in the API. So, hats off to GBIF and Dave Martin. These are very useful and important APIs.

Last month, I proposed that the Biodiversity Informatics community develop a programmableweb.com clone called programmablebiodiversity.org. There are more and more biodiversity-related APIs available, many of which produce JSON in addition to the usual XML documents via REST. Surely people more clever than me can produce presentational & analytical gadgets if there was a one-stop-shop for all the APIs and a showcase for what people are doing with these data services. The response from TDWG was luke-warm. I think there's a time and place for development outside the busy work of standards creation. But, there were a few very enthusiastic responses from Tim Robertson, Donald Hobern, Lee Belbin, Vince Smith and a few others. It turns out that Markus Döring and the EDIT team in Berlin have been creating something approaching my vision called BD (Biodiversity) Tracker at http://www.bdtracker.net. I just hope they clean it up and extend it to approximate the geekery in programmableweb.com with some clean cut recipes for people to dive into using APIs like this. [Aside: Is it just me or all the Drupal templates starting to look a little canned and dreary?].

There's plenty more I want to do with this JSON-based PygmyBrowse so if you have ideas or suggestions, by all means drop a comment. Rod wants to contribute this code to an open-source repository & I'll be sure to contribute this as a subproject.