WFO API DOCUMENTATION
Original Authors: eMonocot development Team at Royal Botanical Garden, Kew (https://github.com/RBGKew/eMonocot).
Adapted for WFO by: William Ulate, Sunitha Katabathuni (2020).

The WFO API is a “RESTful API” to access the data contain in the World Flora Online .
CAVEAT: WFO inherited the the eMonocot API and although we are not currently actively developing it further (yet), we intend to maintain it and fix any issues reported.

Using your API token and the key for a taxon (WFO-ID), you can get the taxon object information from the /taxon endpoint.  
It’s also good to mention here that the <title> of the page is the taxon name (with authorship).

This API documentation is mostly based on the inherited documentation of eMonocot.  It has been reviewed and enabled in WFO, but it is provided as is.
Please report any issues with it to wfo@worldfloraonline.org.

Registered users are able to use an API to access data about the [WFO] portal. This is a RESTful API. 
The following resources are available:

- /taxon dwc:Taxon
- /image gbif:Image
- /reference gbif:Reference
- /organisation Organisations
- /resource Resources

In addition the search feature is exposed programmatically at the endpoint /search.

Documentation for each endpoint is provided in RestDoc format, and can be retrieved by making an OPTIONS request to the endpoint [e.g. using 'curl -X OPTIONS http://www.worldfloraonline.org/search']. 

Requests are secured using either HTTP Basic authentication, using your username and password, or using your API key (found on your user home page) with the parameter 'apikey'. Some requests require you to authenticate.  

The API requires that the 'Accept' header to be set to '*/*' and 'Content-Type' header either set to 'application/json' for JSON or to 'application/javascript' for JSONP. If JSONP is required, the parameter 'callback' must also be provided to specify the name of the callback function.

You can try, for example, this command to get the information on Erythrina costaricensis Micheli in a JSON response (remember to set your API Key to the API token):

  curl -H "Accept: */*" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X GET http://www.worldfloraonline.org/taxon/wfo-0000165885


Integration with TPL (The Plant List)
A new /tpl resouce has been enabled in the WFO Portal to allow access to the corresponding name from TPL in WFO.  You can get the taxon object information from the /TPL endpoint using the TPL ID.
For example, http://www.worldfloraonline.org/tpl/ild-12311 will redirect to the corresponding record in WFO for Erythrina costaricensis.


Integration with IPNI and WCVP
Thanks to the collaboration of colleagues at Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, one of our WFO Partners, we have matched the WFOIDs with the IPNI and WCVP IDs.  This way, two new resources, /ipni and /wcvp have been enabled in the WFO Portal to allow access to the corresponding name from IPNI and WCVP respectively in WFO.
For example, http://www.worldfloraonline.org/ipni/96578-2 and http://www.worldfloraonline.org/wcvp/96578-2 would link to the corresponding record in WFO for Erithrina costaricensis.

Integration with MS Excel
As an example, a WFO_API_for_Excel.bas file is available to demonstrate integration with MS Excel; two functions: getWFOID() and getScientificName() have been developed to get the WFOID of the scientific name in the current cell and get the scientific name of the WFOID in the current cell, respectively.  If several options are available, only data from the first record is returned.