gnverify

Takes a name or a list of names and verifies them against a variety of biodiversity Data Sources

• Features
• Installation
  • MS Windows
  • Linux and Mac
  • Compile from source
• Usage
  • One name-string
  • Many name-strings in a file
  • Options and flags
    • help
    • version
    • name_field
    • format
    • sources
    • preferred_only
• Copyright

Features

• Small and fast app to verify scientific names against many biodiversity databases.
• Has 4 different match levels:
  • Exact: complete match with a canonical form or full name-string from a data source.
  • Fuzzy: if exact match did not happen, it tries to match name-strings assuming spelling errors.
  • Partial: strips middle or last epithets from bi- or multi-nomial names and tries to match what is left.
  • PartialFuzzy: the same as Partial but assuming spelling mistakes.
• Taxonomic resolution. If a database contains taxonomic information, returns currently accepted name for a name-string, if it is different from the matched name.
• Best match is returned according to the match score. Data sources with some manual curation have priority over auto-curated and uncurated datasets. For example Catalogue of Life or WoRMS are considered curated, GBIF auto-curated, uBio not curated.
• It is possible to map any name-strings checklist to any of registered Data Sources.
• If a Data Source provides classification for a name, it will be returned in the output.
• Works for checking just one name-string, or multiple ones written in a file.
• Supports feeding data vie pips of an operating system. This feature allows to chain the program together with other tools.

Installation

MS Windows

Download the latest release from github, unzip.

One possible way would be to create a default folder for executables and place gnveriry there.

Use Windows+R keys combination and type "cmd". In the appeared terminal window type:

mkdir C:\Users\your_username\bin
copy path_to\gnverify.exe C:\Users\your_username\bin

Add C:\Users\your_username\bin directory to your PATH environment variable.

Another, simpler way, would be to use cd C:\Users\your_username\bin command in cmd terminal window. The gnverify program then will be automatically found by Windows operating system when you run its commands from that directory.

You can also read more a detailed guide for Windows users in a PDF document.

Linux and Mac

Download the latest release from github, untar, and install binary somewhere in your path.

tar xvf gnverify-linux-0.2.0.tar.xz
# or tar xvf gnverify-mac-0.2.0.tar.gz
sudo mv gnverify /usr/local/bin

Compile from source

Install Rust according to their installation instructions

cargo install gnverify

Usage

gnverify takes one name-string or a tab-delimited file with many name-strings as an argument, sends a query with these data to remote gnindex server to match the name-strigs against many different biodiversity databases and returns results to STDOUT either in JSON or CSV format.

One name-string

gnverify "Monohamus galloprovincialis"

Many name-strings in a file

gnverify /path/to/names.tsv

The app assumes that a file either contains a simple list of names, one per line, of a tab-separated list where the first column is an id associated with a name_string, and the second is the name-string itself. You can find examples of such files in the project's test directory.

It is also possible to feed data via STDIN:

cat /path/to/names.txt | gnverify

Options and flags

According to POSIX standard flags and options can be given either before or after name-string or file name.

help

gnverify -h
# or
gnverify --help
# or
gnverify

version

gnverify -V
# or
gnverify --version

name_field

If the name-string's ScientificName field is not the first in your data, the name-field flag is very important. Set it to the position of the name-string field.

For example, if your file has the following fields:

"ID", "Taxon_ID", "Name", "Reference", "Notes"

and the "Name" field contains the names you want to verify, use

gnverify -n 3
# or
gnverify --name-field=3

format

Allows to pick a format for output. Supported format are

• compact: one-liner JSON.
• pretty: prettified JSON with new lines and tabs for easier reading.
• csv: (DEFAULT) returns CSV representation.

gnverify -f compact file.txt
# or
gnverify --format="pretty" file.csv

Note that a separate JSON "document" is returned for each separate record, instead of returning one big JSON document for all records. For large lists it significantly speeds up parsin of the JSON on the user side.

sources

By default gnverify returns only one "best" result of a match. If a user has a particular interest in a data set, s/he can set it with this option, and all matches that exist for this source will be returned as well. You need to provide a data source id for a dataset. Ids can be found at the following url. Some of them are provided in the gnverify help output as well.

Data from such sources will be returned in preferred_results section of JSON output, or with CSV rows that start with "PreferredMatch" string.

gnverify file.csv -s "1,11,172"
# or
gnverify file.tsv --sources="12"
# or
cat file.txt | gnverify -s '1,12'

preferred_only

Sometimes all users wants is to map one list of names to a DataSource. They are not interested if name matched anywhere else. In such case you can use the preferred_only flag.

gnverify -p -s '12' file.txt
# or
gnverify --preferred_only --sources='1,12' file.tsv

Copyright

Authors: Dmitry Mozzherin

Copyright (c) 2020 Dmitry Mozzherin. See LICENSE for further details.