The Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is a metadata standard developed by the ecological community for persistence, discoverability, and reuse of ecological data. While the highly detailed structure of the EML schema is necessary to meet these ends, it confronts the inexperienced data provider with a steep learning curve that few have time to tackle. To lower the bar for data documentation, while still maintaining metadata detail and quality, we've created the EMLassemblyline
R code package. A user-friendly workflow to help craft high quality EML metadata yourself. The assembly line is useful for publishing one-off data packages or to provide a foundation for a data package factory.
The assembly line requires little operational knowledge of the R programming language or technical understanding of the EML schema. All you need is to know your dataset and how it was made, a little patience for following our step by step instructions, and how to operate a spread sheet editor. If this is your first time on the assembly line, it may take the better part of a day to become oriented and to produce your first EML metadata file.
A schematic representation of the assembly line process.
Instructions for operating the EML assembly line
EMLassemblyline
is a collection of wrapper functions to the EML
R package developed by Boettiger et al. (2017). For an understanding of what is going on under the hood of the assembly line, we recommend you first take a look at the EML
R package. Once you understand this you will be able to customize the assembly line for your own workflows or become a developer of this project.
The EMLassemblyline
R package is available here on GitHub. To install, go to your RStudio Console window and enter these lines of code:
# Install and load devtools
install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
# Install and load EMLassemblyline
install_github("EDIorg/EMLassemblyline")
library(EMLassemblyline)
Now reference the documentation listed above to start operating the assembly line.
We welcome contributions of all forms including code, bug reports, and requests for development. Please reference our code conduct and contributing guidelines for submitting pull requrests.
This project follows the semantic versioning specification.
Several people have participated in this project. View the current list of team members and contributors.
Learn everything you wanted to know about the Ecological Metadata Language standard.
Reference the community developed best practices for EML content.