Posts

Showing posts from June, 2015

Simplified Downloads

Image
Since its re-launch in 2013  gbif.org  has supported the downloading of occurrence data using an arbitrary query with the download file provided as a  Darwin Core Archive file whose internal content is described here . This format contains comprehensive and self-explanatory information, which makes it suitable to be referenced in external resources. However, in cases where people only need the occurrence data in its simplest form the DwC-A format presents an additional complexity that can make it hard to use the data. Because of that we now support a new download format: a zip file that only contains a single file with the most common fields/terms used, where each column is separated by the TAB character. This makes things much easier when it comes to importing the data into tools such as Microsoft Excel, geographic information systems and relational databases. The current download functionality was extended to allow the selection of the desired format: From this p...