News

Research sites (e.g., LTER sites) and teams of researchers who are using ezEML to capture metadata may find that certain content is used repeatedly across a number of documents. Examples of such repeated content can include Creators, Contacts, Keywords, Intellectual Rights, Geographic Coverage, Project, etc. Users can avoid the tedious task of re-entering this information for each new dataset by creating and publishing one or more “templates” that are prepopulated with this standard content. Since templates exist outside of any individual user’s ezEML account, they are accessible to everyone. Everyone who uses a template will get the current version, which helps alleviate problems arising from different versions residing in different users’ accounts.

Feedback has been positive from researchers who have used ezEML templates when creating metadata for datasets associated with LTER and NEON sites. You can check out template examples by logging in to ezEML and going to “New from Template…” Creating a template is just like creating any ezEML document. Once a template has been populated, it can be sent to support@edirepository.org with an explanation and it will be added to the EDI template library.

The EDI software team is excited to announce DeX, a tool for exploring and subsetting tabular data, which is now in beta testing on the EDI staging Data Portal (https://portal-s.edirepository.org/nis). DeX provides three views into tabular data found in the EDI Data Repository: 1) a statistical profiler that analyzes the data table and displays detailed information about each attribute; 2) a filter and subsetting application that allows you to download the subsetted data, along with a new EML metadata document describing the subset; and 3) a simple-to-use scatter and line plotting application that gives you a visual glimpse into data trends. DeX is currently available on either of our development or staging Data Portals and works with CSV-based data tables (soon to work with a wider set of tabular formats). To see DeX in action, look for a data package in the staging Data Portal containing a CSV data file and click on the “Data Explorer – experimental” link at the end of the data entity record information (see below):

EDIutils is a client for the Environmental Data Initiative repository REST API and includes functions to search and access existing data, evaluate and upload new data, and assist with related data management tasks (https://github.com/EDIorg/EDIutils).

The package has undergone a major refactor for submission to rOpenSci and CRAN. This new and improved version (0.0.0.9000) covers the full data repository REST API, handles authentication more securely, better matches API call and result syntax, improves documentation, and opens the door for development of wrapper functions to support common data management tasks.

In the process of this refactor the function names and call patterns have changed and several functions supporting other EDI R packages have been removed, thereby creating back compatibility breaking changes with the previous major release (version 1.6.1). The previous version will be available until 2022-06-01 on the “deprecated” branch. Install the previous version with: remotes::install_github(“EDIorg/EDIutils”, ref = “deprecated”)