With the City Nature Challenge we managed to recruit more and more user of iNaturalist here in Luxembourg. Now we started playing around with the API so that we can make use of the data about Luxembourg here at the Natural History Museum. We do also manage some other iNat projects, mostly “traditional” ones.
A Thing that interests us is to find out to which projects the observations in our place (Luxembourg) belong to. ex. having all the observations for our country and being able to see into which projects they fall.
The information if an observation belongs to one of the “traditional” projects is contained in the .json data that I get from the API. However any information about observations being contained in the newer “collection” projects is nowhere to be found. Also when doing a csv download this information is not contained in the data-set.
I know that on the iNat website one is not able to see if ones observation is contained in an collection project one is not a member of (joined). And one can not see in which collections a observation of another person is part of.
I understand that the collections projects work differently than the traditional ones. I would imagine that adding a project ID to each observation contained in collections (there are probably a lot of collection projects by now) may be a large load on the system.
Has anyone else looked into this? Found a work around or has any suggestions?
That would be an interesting feature request, assuming of course it can’t yet be done. As more and more collection type projects are made, being able to see what projects a specific observation is a member of (ie fits the criteria of) would be of wide interest.
If no answer is offered on how to do it (over the next week?), please consider raising it as a feature request!
You can’t move it, but maybe just start a new topic under feature requests, and link back to this topic. Or maybe @boutelua or @chalie or @mira_l_b could change it to a feature request. I think finding a list of projects a given observation could qualify for would be the desired outcome here…
Hey guys. @kiwifergus I think I’m the only one who got tagged in here and alas, I am too dense to comprehend the technicality of the subject matter. We can certainly change this to a feature request on our end but since I don’t know if there is an existing answer to the question/ request here I’ll hold off until someone’s more knowledgeable eyes see this. Sorry I can’t be of more help sooner, @paul_luap
So, it currently shows you which collection projects your observation is in only if you have joined the collection project . I think the idea is to avoid showing every single one because there are well, a whole lot of them, and it might overwhelm the observation page. But i agree, it would be very interesting to see a list, maybe as a dropdown list or a link. I think that could be a feature request.
I’m imagining a page kind of like the CV/AI test page, where you can go and put in an obs number, and it show a list of all projects that the observation would qualify for based on the rules of all projects. Being a somewhat intensive thing to look up, I would imagine it shouldn’t be something done unless expressly desired, so having to go to another page and enter a single obs # would keep the server load down. It would be a way of exploring the projects to see what is out there, so maybe accessible from the projects page.