Google Chart API in GBIF Provider Software

Since I came across the Google Chart API I always wanted to try to use it for biodiversity data. And finally I have the chance to. Working on a new provider software for biodiversity data with GBIF, I am using Google Charts to give statistical overviews about the datasets being served.

This is what an overview currently looks like:

A major difference between this software and "classical" wrapper solutions in the biodiversity community, e.g. TapirLink or the BioCASE Provider Software, is to provide an extensible cache database which is specific for biodiversity datatypes. This allows to develop richer user interfaces and webservices and hopefully provide more value to end users, thereby reaching out to more data holders.

Initially the software is planned to work with occurrence/specimen data, taxonomic checklist data and general dataset descriptions using EML files. The software allows you to upload data from databases or files into the cache. Data in the cache can not be modified (other than removing/replacing the entire dataset), so during the upload the data can be analyzed and enhanced. For example UUIDs are assigned if no GUID existed already and records are compared to previously existing records, thereby detecting if a record was modified, deleted or added (information needed for incremental harvesting, e.g. via OAI).  You can read more about the planned functionality on the project wiki (simple bullet points, no proper documentation I am afraid), or in subsequent posts when I will focus on different aspects of the evolving software.

I have been using gchartjava to create the URLs for the google charts, as they can become quite unwieldy if  you deal with more data. But in general it is very nice to work with the API. It is fast enough to answer dynamically generated URLs and the semi-automatic layout works pretty well. Even though this example here, number of specimens grouped by families, contains quite a lot of labels, it works well with an accompanying table.

But the best part of GCharts I think are the country maps. How many times did I want to visualise country based information? With GCharts this is dead easy. You can either assign a specific color to each ISO country (or US state within the US) or assign an integer to each country you want to mark and specify a gradient by defining the color for the max and the min value provided. So in the simplest case you can just pass the number of occurrences for each country. If that number is too large it is better to normalize it before though, because URL strings are limited in length.

Apart from a world map, Google also provides 6 different regional focuses, for example Asia, Europe or the Middle East. So far I am impressed!