GeoMeta

Making locations citable.

Project overview

Building tools to allow the sharing of geospatial metadata and the automatic reconstruction of datasets from raw data and metadata.

The problem

In geoscience research, spatial data stored as two dimensional arrays, known as digital elevation models (DEMs). Researchers work on spatial subsets of this data, but only cite the original full dataset. This makes it challenging to reproduce geospatial research and results in a lack of transparency in research.

Install guide

pip install -r requirements.txt

For users who may already have a gdal install this may cause issues with rasterio. This can be solved through reninstalling an up to date gdal using:

conda install -c conda-forge gdal

For some users, gdal may still not work in some cases, but the latest version of rasterio does not depend on gdal, it can be installed with:

pip install git+https://github.com/mapbox/rasterio.git

Usage examples

Using the tool within an existing python workflow is simple.

I am a Researcher who wants to create a GeoMeta file for my dataset myDataSubset.tif, where the doi of the original data is 10.5069/G9HT2M76 and the doi of my paper is doi.org/10.1002/esp.3884. This will write an output GeoMeta file called myMeta.json:

import geometa
geometa.get_meta('myDataSubset.tif', '10.5069/G9HT2M76',
                 'doi.org/10.1002/esp.3884', 'myMeta.json')

I have been given a GeoMeta file myMeta.json and want to recreate a dataset. First, download the raw data linked in the DOI field of the myMeta.json file. Then download the file, following the instructions given by the data provider fullData.tif. This code will generate an output file which matches the original researcher's data file:

import geometa
geometa.from_metadata('myMeta.json', 'fullData.tif', 'output.tif')

This software supports a wide range of geospatial data formats, the full list of these files can be found here. Please open an issue if a filetype on this list does not work for you.

Contribution guidelines

Contributions welcome, please open an issue in the issue tracker, or submit a pull request with new features.

You can contact the authors via geometa@swdg.io or on twitter @GIStuart

Citation

License

This code is MIT licensed.

Future steps

The next step for this project is to build out the code and tests to handle more edge cases, where bad data is provided, to attempt to steer the user to correct their data.

The eventual goal for the project is to host the tool online as a service, where researchers can create GeoMeta files without needing to install anything locally on their machines.

A potentially useful tool to add to the online service would be a google maps widget that automatically displays the location where the data was collected.