Technical overview and instructions on FinBIF API and services
All technical documentation is available only in English.
You are currently at FinBIF's public portal (laji.fi, gbif.fi, species.fi) where it is possible to browse most of the data that has been collected to FinBIF. A fundamental goal of FinBIF is to provide all data in machine readable formats, so that the data and services can be used by 3rd party applications. This can be accomplised using our public API (application programming interface) and/or GIS services.
Open data
All data provided by FinBIF is open data. However, some data, especially occurrence data, may be secured because of sensitivity issues. FinBIF shares data from partner organizations and other 3rd party datasets: these datasets have their own user access licenses. You can read more about handling sensitive information from Data management subsection. FinBIF provides API access also to the unsecured occurrence data to government officials, etc, as you can read further in the API subsection.
Read also: Datasets and their use; user access licenses, citation, etc: in English, in Finnish
API
The FinBIF portal is built using solely our public API that is accessible to anyone else. This should ensure that our API is robust, performant, reliable and easy to use. The API can be found from:
The API is at the moment in beta (/v0). At the moment we do not guarantee backwards compatibility and we may still make fundamental changes. Once we have stabilized our services, we will publish a /v1 and after that all breaking changes will be done to the next version (/v2 and so on).
Make sure to read the documentation.
GIS
Currently occurrence data can be manually downloaded in common GIS formats (OGC GeoPackage, ESRI Shapefile).
FinBIF API offers occurrence data in GeoJSON format (see /aggregate endpoint in API documentation), which can be utilized in QGIS and some other applications. Using occurrence API in GIS systems: GeoJSON format. In the coming years our goal is to provide WFS, WMS services.
We have some other geospatial utilities as well which are documented in the GIS section of this documentation.
Documentation
Documentation of our services has been split into several parts:
- Architectural overview that explains different types of data, their origins and how the data is joined together
- Explanation on semantic web and and Linked Open Data: identifiers, ontologies, etc
- Api.laji.fi: More detailed documentation about the API and the different endpoints, including a change log
- R-package that can be used to access FinBIF API
- GIS documentation
- Code repository
Read also
- Datasets and their use: user access licenses, citation, etc (in English, in Finnish)
- FinBIF data policy (in English, in Finnish)
- Presentations page has a few technical presentations (in English, in Finnish)
Contact
We welcome all questions, suggestions and other feedback! You can ask questions on Laji.fi forum, send email to helpdesk@laji.fi or use the feedback form on the FinBIF portal.