Ability to search on common names

[Scott Chamberlain]

TimeTree has this functionality, it would be nice to have it in DateLife.

What is the best way to go about this? Since there can be more than one common name that matches a species name, we could just select the first scientific name that returns. There won't be any scores associated to use.

The fastest method may be to load the NCBI and/or ITIS databases into the server, and make sql calls to them from R using e.g, taxize functions to get sci names from common names. Then pass those names to search phylogenies.

[Brian O'Meara]

Probably out of scope for DateLife to store taxonomy locally, but using OpenTree's TNRS should do this (it correctly takes "Human" and returns "Homo sapiens", for example)