Re: [Treebase-devel] treebase r package available on cran

[William P. <wil...@ya...>]

On Oct 27, 2011, at 2:12 PM, Carl Boettiger wrote:

> I think the primary thing I noticed was that I couldn't identify if a tree had branch-length information without downloading the actual data file. 

hmm.. The database itself does not store a flag to indicate whether a tree has or has not any branch-lengths. But it has been our intention to comply more fully with the PhyloWS specs and provide URIs to all objects, including nodes. Hence, presumably there could eventually be a query like this:

/phylows/node/find?query=brlen>0&recordSchema=tree

Is that what you have in mind? 

Alternatively, perhaps it would be better to pre-calculate and store metadata separately, like "longest root to tip path", "tree balance", "mean clade support", etc. 

bp