April 9, 2024

MetaEgress is a R package to create Ecological Metadata Language (EML) standard metadata documents from an installed and populated LTER-core-metabase. LTER-core-metabase is a metadata database design for management of ecological research metadata, created by the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network and oriented towards production of EML documents at LTER sites. For information on LTER-core-metabase see https://github.com/lter/LTER-core-metabase. The two projects are tightly coupled: make sure to keep both up to date.

MetaEgress is a play on "Postgres", or "post-Ingres", where Ingres is PostgreSQL's predecessor.

MetaEgress's main functionality is to first query metadata LTER-core-metabase, then insert information into appropriate EML slots, then finally ouput a R list structured according to the EML standard. To validate and serialize or write to .xml file, pass MetaEgress output into the functions eml_validate and write_emlavailable from theEML` R package.

• Quick and easy workflow to create and update EML documents
• Good for multiple datasets under a project
• Reproducible metadata generation
• Support for
  • multiple missing value codes per attribute
  • revision history
  • detailed, multiple-step methods section

Execute this line in R console to install MetaEgress. Note that MetaEgress depends on the EML R package >= 1.99.0 from https://github.com/ropensci/EML or 2.0.0 CRAN, and RPostgres >= 1.1.1.

devtools::install_github("BLE-LTER/MetaEgress")

See example/example_workflow.R for example workflow, from LTER-core-metabase input to EML document (.xml file) final ouput. Note that the example code cannot be run as-is. To try MetaEgress functionality without an installed and populated instance of LTER-core-metabase, use the example_metadata_list data attached with the package.

when updating the code and publishing a new release, be sure to also:

1. Update the date at the top of this readme.
2. Update the version in the DESCRIPTION file.