Presubmission Inquiry: pyBHL

[MikeTrizna]

pyBHL presubmission inquiry

Submitting Author: Mike Trizna (@MikeTrizna )
Package Name: pyBHL
One-Line Description of Package: Python wrapper for Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) API
Repository Link (if existing): N/A

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Description

• Include a brief paragraph describing what your package does:

This will just be a simple Python wrapper around the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) API. BHL is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL has a web API (documented at https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/docs/api3.html) with 16 endpoints that largely deal with searching the BHL database. The API requires an API key, and returns results in XML or JSON format.

Scope

• Please indicate which category or categories this package falls under:

  • Data retrieval
  • Data extraction
  • Data munging
  • Data deposition
  • Data visualization
  • Reproducibility
  • Geospatial
  • Education
  • Unsure/Other (explain below)

• Explain how the and why the package falls under these categories (briefly, 1-2 sentences). Please note any areas you are unsure of:

  This is a wrapper of a data access web API.

• Who is the target audience and what are scientific applications of this package?

  Primary target audience is anyone who might want to access BHL content. Typically, this would be a biodiversity informatics researcher. Secondary target audience is to determine best practices in building an API wrapper so that more can be created for the pyOpenSci ecosystem.

• Are there other Python packages that accomplish the same thing? If so, how does yours differ?

  There are no known Python packages on GitHub for the BHL API. There is an existing ROpenSci package for this API (https://github.com/ropensci/rbhl), so I can use that as a measure of completeness.

• Any other questions or issues we should be aware of?:

  As of August 2019, more than a quarter of all ROpenSci packages are in the "data access" category. (See a quick notebook at https://nbviewer.jupyter.org/gist/MikeTrizna/09bfc3fe7f3874f50a6ca723acef5fe6). Python has such a great toolset for accessing data on the web, so it would be great to start building API wrappers for the pyOpenSci project.

P.S. Have feedback/comments about our review process? Leave a comment here

[lwasser]

Thank you for this presubmission @MikeTrizna !! we will get back to you on the next steps !!

[lwasser]

@MikeTrizna my apologies for being slow to get back to you on this. I think that the group is confident in this package being a good fit. So the next steps are for it to just be submitted when you full develop it. Did you have any other questions? if not we can close this and you can open a new issue when you have a package to submit! please let me know what you think!

[lwasser]

hey @MikeTrizna i am going to close this issue as it's been open for 1.5 ~ years. if you ever decide that you'd like to submit to us or if you have questions please get in touch!

[MikeTrizna]

Woops, I didn't realize this was still Open. Sounds good. I recently started working with the BHL API again after a long break, and will create a new issue when a Python wrapper is in working order.