Overview

Information Management Code Registry Hackathon

Synopsis:

The Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) is hosting a hackathon on June 11 to 13, 2019 at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM. The event brings together a diverse group of people to collaboratively design and work on code that supports the activities of information managers and scientists working with environmental data. The event is designed as a hands-on, participant driven workshop. Participants will break into subgroups to collaboratively tackle coding projects.

Motivation:

Ecological Metadata Language (EML) is often used to document environmental data sets for deposition in a data repository. Because an EML document contains detailed descriptions of the structure of its associated data tables, it is possible to create tools that autogenerate code to visualize the data. In this hackathon, we propose to design and code, in a Shiny app or using web services, visualization tools that will help researchers quickly visualize and evaluate datasets for fitness of use.

The hackathon is also meant to add to the Information Management Code Repository (IMCR), a resource for code cleaning, manipulating, formatting, documenting, and archiving environmental data sets. The IMCR is implemented in Ontosoft, a tool for software stewardship that offers assistance with metadata capture, open source publication, and dissemination of code through a “software commons”. The IMCR portal is here: http://imcr.ontosoft.org/#list