dbetchkal / metadig Goto Github PK

Because the metadata database currently includes coordinates in decimal degrees, a meaningful feature would be if a user could provide a polygon shapefile that contains a study area of interest, and metaDig could return data collected in that spatial area.

A simpler option could be to specify the corners of a rectangle using decimal degrees such that metaDig would return all sites within it.

Conceivably I could see these as two parameters named something like study_area and bounding_rectangle.

Another, more complicated - and wishful - idea would be to allow the user to filter based on zones or numeric ranges within raster or vector datasets. Allowing ad hoc filter feels more expansive than we could support, but the ability to use a few well-chosen national scale datasets available on a network drive (or perhaps publicly hosted on the internet) could add quite a bit of usefulness to the tool.

I've been looking at pyodbc and it has promise as a library that might allow us to read data directly from the Access metadata database.

Unfortunately there are some issues that arise when the bitness of a user's python environment and their Microsoft Office install don't match. Since we expect soundDB and iyore to run in 64-bit python, users would all have to have 64-bit Office to allow this approach to work. Not sure we can guarantee that.

Another option, of course, would be to export some kind of reduced file from Access occasionally, but I worry about the maintenance of that: who exports a new version, and how often?

Our new approach to storing metadata is through an IRMA application: https://irma.nps.gov/NSNSD/Acoustic/

Release of this database supersedes the use of the older MS Access database. As of right now, there is little known about the potential for an Application Programmer's Interface. It will be the first step in developing metaDig to understand it.