Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

October 5, 2014

EcoData Retriever

Filed under: Data Repositories,Ecoinformatics — Patrick Durusau @ 6:01 pm

EcoData Retriever

From the webpage:

Most ecological datasets do not adhere to any agreed-upon standards in format, data structure or method of access. As a result acquiring and utilizing available datasets can be a time consuming and error prone process. The EcoData Retriever automates the tasks of finding, downloading, and cleaning up ecological data files, and then stores them in a local database. The automation of this process reduces the time for a user to get most large datasets up and running by hours, and in some cases days. Small datasets can be downloaded and installed in seconds and large datasets in minutes. The program also cleans up known issues with the datasets and automatically restructures them into standard formats before inserting the data into your choice of database management systems (Microsoft Access, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite, on Windows, Mac and Linux).

When faced with:

…datasets [that] do not adhere to any agreed-upon standards in format, data structure or method of access

you can:

  • Complain to fellow cube dwellers
  • Complain about data producers
  • Complain to the data producers
  • Create a solution to clean up and reformat the data as open source

Your choice?

I first saw this in a tweet by Dan McGlinn

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

Powered by WordPress