Add a `sites` method.

[SimonGoring]

Especially with Neotoma data, it is possible to return a large number of occurrence results from a few sites.

This would also be applicable for trying to estimate sampling effort, e.g., show me all sites from which data has been collected in some sort of bounding box (that could include time).

I would like to suggest a sites method, which returns:

• site name (or some identifier)
• lat
• long
• age younger
• age older
• database
• number of samples (?) - maybe not, this gets into differences in analysis units & occurrences, for microfossil records I'm not as interested in the total number of occurrences within a dataset/site as I am with the number of analysis units.

so:

/sites?bbox=-127,23,127,24&ageYounger=2&ageOlder=6

would return all sites from the composite data service that match this. We could search with many (all?) of the same parameters that we do with the occurrences.

/sites?bbox=-127,23,127,24&ageYounger=2&ageOlder=6

[mmcclenn]

Yes, I agree we need one of these. In order to make this work, I need to be able to query Neotoma for sites. I will talk to Mike Anderson about creating one.

[SimonGoring]

There is already a sites method, it's documented at http://api.neotomadb.org/doc/resources/sites. Really, on the Neotoma side, we'd need something that lies in between the datasets and sites methods. So that we don't return duplicate sites if they have multiple dataset types at them.

I assume in PBDB you have the paleocoords linked through collection_no to the collection and then to the occurrences? In this case, then maybe we need to think of Neotoma datasets as more akin to PBDB collections, where a collection is a single point or bounded polygon. Is that fair?

[mmcclenn]

That method doesn't suit the purpose. We need something equivalent to http://apidev.neotomadb.org/v1/data/occurrences that will take the same set of parameters but return a list of distinct sites rather than a list of distinct occurrences.

Is there a forum for the Neotoma developers where I can raise this as an issue?