Release notes for web API v3

this is work in progress

This page gives information for users of the Open Tree of Life v2 web API regarding the transition to v3.

Full documentation for the v3 web API is here: Open Tree of Life Web APIs

Discontinued features

• All graph/ methods are discontinued, not available even under their v2/ URLs, with no replacement

Incompatible changes in parameters and results

• Synthetic tree node ids are written as strings instead of integers

New features

• include_children boolean parameter to the taxonomy/taxon method, and children in result (list of taxon descriptions similar to include_lineage; compare arguson)

Changes / additions under consideration

• Parameter and output field names normalized.
  • "ott_id" rather than "ottID" (in taxonomy/taxon) and "ot:ottId" (in tnrs/ methods)
  • "tax_rank" rather than "rank" (in taxonomy/taxon)
  • "name" or "tax_name" rather than "ot:ottTaxonName" (Arguson currently uses "name")
  • maybe "tax_sources" instead of "tax_source"
  • but note that the phylesystem methods use camelCase ... that's unfortunate
• Considering: /studies/all_studies (list of ids for all studies) - we have the method, just a matter of exposing and documenting it
• draft_tree_id - get the id of the default / current synthetic tree (expose already existing method)
• Method for getting a subtree of the synthetic tree (exists, but with odd name and calling convention)
• It's proposed to split date in tree_of_life/about into date_created and date_deployed
• Optional argument to tree_of_life methods specifying which synthetic tree to use (currently there's only one, but in future there could be several)
• Rename lica to mrca
• Rename taxon to taxon_info to match node_info
• what else? see google doc

Probably not ready yet

• advertised conflict report generator
• new study/tree index (OTI replacement) using GET instead of POST etc.

ArguSON is not necessarily ready for outside users. Changes to ArguSON are given here: "Arguson" format