The GBIF Backbone taxonomy put into GitHub as a filesystem based taxonomy with one folder per taxon. Every folder is named after the canonical name of the taxon and contains 2 files:
- README.md: A simple human readable overview of the taxon
- data.json: A json file representing the NameUsage as retrieved from the GBIF API, for example Bufo bufo: http://api.gbif.org/v0.9/species/5217160
The folder hierarchy in the filesystem exactly represents the taxonomic classification.
The files have been generated by a small experimental java class NubGitExporter.java which is part of the GBIF Checklist Bank project.
The backbone version hosted here has the following known bugs, reviewed in this blog post:
- Animalia and Plantae are not populated because git was soooo slow
- Synonyms and infraspecific taxa are erroneously mapped to the same folder as their accepted species, thereby overwriting the real species information