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Where To Get A List Of Species?

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?

taxonomy
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updated by Pierre Lindenbaum Pierre Lindenbaum • written by michaelfaraday • michaelfaraday

3 answers

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.

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written by Adrian Adrian

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.

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written by Neilfws Neilfws

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.

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written by michaelfaraday • michaelfaraday

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

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written by Malachi Griffith Malachi Griffith

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