As this site deals with multilingual content, we have had a number of comments saying that people can't read read some of the script on the pages. This is the result of not having the correct fonts installed on your machine. Where possible I have been trying to keep track of sources of fonts for download, and these are linked to on the following page: http://gbif.myspecies.info/help/fonts/sources
If any of these do not work or if you find any additional fonts that are useful please use the comment form at the bottom of this page.

Thinking about this problem a little further, I've come up with an idea that may well scale to all data that we may like to serve in a similar way to this.

Basically, we have for each data type (language; rank; country) an entry, this entry can be either the "standard", or an alternative. If it is the standard, then it is marked as so, if it is the alternative, then it will contain a pointer to the standard.

As of today (11/12/07) I have the complete Language data (ISO-693-3) loaded into the site, along with the Country Code data (ISO-3166-?) which will be updated to the very latest ISO-3166-3 shortly

You can already get some basic information regarding languages with a few simple URLs:

• http://gbif.myspecies.info/gbif/lang/langid/eee Retrieves all the languages specified under the Language ID "eee". The definitive language for that ID will be marked with a final "L".
• http://gbif.myspecies.info/gbif/lang/name/wusehua Retrieves the language details for "Wusehua", and also the defined language that it is derived from

How are these URLs? composed?

Using the second example above, the URL has five main parts:

1. gbif.myspecies.info

   Simply the domain name where the service is made available. Any other Scratchpad domain could host a similar service to this

2. gbif

   A defined string used so that we know we're dealing with a query our SDP service

3. lang

   The data type to query. Only 'lang' is supported currently, however 'country', and 'rank' will be added soon

4. name

   The field to perform the search on.

5. wusehua

   The term being searched (simply user input)