Where To Get A List Of Species?

Question

[michaelfaraday]

I am developing a software for animal population genetics, and at one point the user must select a species and possibly a breed. Instead of writing by hand a list of domestic animal breeds or species, I'd like to obtain it programmatically from a local or remote source, that is, in a standarized format like a XML or RDF file. For example, the DAD-IS (Domestic Animal Diversity Information System) has a list of species : http://dad.fao.org/cgi-bin/EfabisWeb.cgi?sid=1369c2a0c0fbcb93d742cc42be795d3b,reportsreport10 and for each one, you may get a list of breeds grouped by country. AFAIK they do not offer a web service to consume this kind of information. Do you know any other source of such information? Can you show an example in any programming language?

Answer 1

[Adrian]

You can obtain such information from the NCBI Taxonomy Database: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/taxonomy

The data is available by FTP ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/pub/taxonomy as well as through Entrez, so you could access it in XML over the web through the Entrez E-Utilities interfaces.

[Neilfws]

This is probably the best solution for species, if not breeds (though note it is not an "authoritative" taxonomic source). There seem to be several incomplete, poorly-designed online resources for breeds, all of which lack any kind of useful features such as APIs or downloadable data.

[michaelfaraday]

It would be nice if you may provide more detailed information, there are several files in the directory and narrowing the search it would save some time to people.

Answer 2

[Malachi Griffith]

You can check out the Integrated Taxonomic Information System which also lists a variety of related resources. Database dumps are available here.

Answer 3

[Pierre Lindenbaum]

Mediawiki/wikipedia api http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=categorymembers&cmtitle=Category:Domesticated_animals&cmlimit=500&cmnamespace=0

(and subcategories http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=categorymembers&cmtitle=Category:Domesticated_animals&cmlimit=500&cmnamespace=14 )

(or the DBPedia SPARQL API)