Setting up data infrastructure to simplify management of (ecological) data, to facilitate publishing using open community standards (foremost as a Darwin Core Archive) was centre stage for the discussion at our miniworkshop this week.
One of the activities we are engaged with currently is to develop R-functionality that help researchers in ecology and related fields to manage their data (see e.g. this blog post for more about the topic). To this end, we have started to collect functions in an add-on library for statistical software R, called LivingNorwayR. The work is just initiated, so the package is very much in development. However, the idea is that we will develop a set of functionality that will facilitate:
- Metadata creation, by reading from the core data files
- Quality control of data
- Matching taxonomy to selected databases
- Mapping to and reading from Darwin Core
- Reading and writing Darwin Core Archives
- Visualizing the geographic extent of data
- …. and many other features
Wednesday this week, we met to discuss the state of the project, including a brain storming session to voice ideas about additional functionality to include as we move forward with the development. There are still some major decisions to be taken regarding the general programming approach, and the functions have not yet found their final form. Please keep watching out for updates on the project!
Want to learn more or contribute – visit our GitHub site for this project: