A version of the full ITIS database is available for downloading via HTTP.

There are two "TAR" files that are updated once a month as new data is added to ITIS. These updated files are posted on or about the 10th of each month.

Summary:

The basic steps to create and use either of these two files are summarized as follows:

1. The ITIS database and associated files are exported and compressed as a two zipped TAR files.
2. The first TAR file (itismmddyy.TAR.gz) is for the Informix Database.
3. The second TAR file (itisMSmmddyy.TAR.gz) is for the MS Sql Server 2000 Database.
4. These files may be retrieved to a local machine via HTTP and then uncompressed.
5. Either of the two schema files itis.sql (Informix) or itisMS.sql (MS Sql Server 2000) may used to create database tables for the ITIS data.
6. The ITIS data is then loaded into the new tables on the local machine and accessed using an RDBMS.

Detailed Instructions:

• For Informix, a Linux tar command
  "tar cfz itismmddyy.TAR.gz itis.mmddyy"
  was used to create a tar file with all the ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1) files associated with the database(~ 103Meg), where mmddyy is the month, day and year the file was created.
• Likewise for MS Sql Server 2000, a Linux tar command
  "tar cfz itisMSmmddyy.TAR.gz itisMS.mmddyy"
  was used to create a tar file with all the ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1) files associated with the database(~ 106Meg), and again where mmddyy is the month, day and year the file was created.
• The Informix "TAR" file was gzip’ed (~14 MB) to facilitate the HTTP transfer.
• And the MS Sql Server 2000 "TAR" file was also gzip’ed (~14 MB) to facilitate the HTTP transfer.
• These files can be downloaded via a browser from the directory at
  http://www.itis.gov/downloads.
• To access the Informix "TAR" file on your local Linux machine, it can be unzipped and untarred by issuing the command:
  "tar xvfz itismmddyy.TAR.gz".
  This will unzip and untar the file into a directory with its name in the following format "itis.mmddyy" where mmddyy is the month, day and year.
• To access the MS Sql Server 2000 "TAR" file on your Linux machine, use the command:
  "tar xvfz itisMSmmddyy.TAR.gz".
  Again this will unzip and untar the file into a directory with its name in the following format "itisMS.mmddyy" where mmddyy is the month, day and year.
• If the local machine uses the Windows operating system, the files may be unzipped with WinZip. Please note that for the Informix "TAR" file, the end-of-line character on all these files is the new line (LF) or (\n) character. But for the MS Sql Server 2000 "TAR" file, the end-of-line characters on all of those files is the carriage return and newline (CR LF) or (\r\n) characters.
• The schema file itis.sql (Informix) and itisMS.sql (MS Sql Server 2000) are ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1) files that both include all of the create table statements plus additional information. This will allow comparison to the schema files that are available in the future to determine any changes. The table files are in an ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1) pipe delimited format.

Note About Diacritical Characters:

As of 8/18/00 diacritical characters associated with taxon authors have been modified to reflect their ISO Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1) representation.