Parse Darwin Core Files

Parse and create Darwin Core (< http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/>) Simple and Archives. Functionality includes reading and parsing all the files in a Darwin Core Archive, including the datasets and metadata; read and parse simple Darwin Core files; and validation of Darwin Core Archives.

finch parses Darwin Core simple and archive files

In the future, we may make it easy to create Darwin Core archive files as well.

Darwin Core description at Biodiversity Information Standards site http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/
Darwin Core at Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_Core

Stable version

install.packages("finch")

Development version, from GitHub

devtools::install_github("ropensci/finch")

library("finch")

Parse

To parse a simple darwin core file like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<SimpleDarwinRecordSet
 xmlns="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/xsd/simpledarwincore/"
 xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
 xmlns:dwc="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/"
 xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
 xsi:schemaLocation="http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/xsd/simpledarwincore/ ../../xsd/tdwg_dwc_simple.xsd">
 <SimpleDarwinRecord>
  <dwc:occurrenceID>urn:catalog:YPM:VP.057488</dwc:occurrenceID>
  <dc:type>PhysicalObject</dc:type>
  <dc:modified>2009-02-12T12:43:31</dc:modified>
  <dc:language>en</dc:language>
  <dwc:basisOfRecord>FossilSpecimen</dwc:basisOfRecord>
  <dwc:institutionCode>YPM</dwc:institutionCode>
  <dwc:collectionCode>VP</dwc:collectionCode>
  <dwc:catalogNumber>VP.057488</dwc:catalogNumber>
  <dwc:individualCount>1</dwc:individualCount>
  <dwc:locationID xsi:nil="true"/>
  <dwc:continent>North America</dwc:continent>
  <dwc:country>United States</dwc:country>
  <dwc:countryCode>US</dwc:countryCode>
  <dwc:stateProvince>Montana</dwc:stateProvince>
  <dwc:county>Garfield</dwc:county>
  <dwc:scientificName>Tyrannosourus rex</dwc:scientificName>
  <dwc:genus>Tyrannosourus</dwc:genus>
  <dwc:specificEpithet>rex</dwc:specificEpithet>
  <dwc:earliestPeriodOrHighestSystem>Creataceous</dwc:earliestPeriodOrHighestSystem>
  <dwc:latestPeriodOrHighestSystem>Creataceous</dwc:latestPeriodOrHighestSystem>
  <dwc:earliestEonOrHighestEonothem>Late Cretaceous</dwc:earliestEonOrHighestEonothem>
  <dwc:latestEonOrHighestEonothem>Late Cretaceous</dwc:latestEonOrHighestEonothem>
 </SimpleDarwinRecord>
</SimpleDarwinRecordSet>

This file is in this package as an example file, get the file, then simple()

file <- system.file("examples", "example_simple_fossil.xml", package = "finch")
out <- simple_read(file)

Index to meta, dc or dwc

out$dc
#> [[1]]
#> [[1]]$type
#> [1] "PhysicalObject"
#> 
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [[2]]$modified
#> [1] "2009-02-12T12:43:31"
#> 
#> 
#> [[3]]
#> [[3]]$language
#> [1] "en"

Parse Darwin Core Archive

To parse a Darwin Core Archive like can be gotten from GBIF use dwca_read()

There's an example Darwin Core Archive:

file <- system.file("examples", "0000154-150116162929234.zip", package = "finch")
(out <- dwca_read(file, read = TRUE))
#> <gbif dwca>
#>   Package ID: 6cfaaf9c-d518-4ca3-8dc5-f5aadddc0390
#>   No. data sources: 10
#>   No. datasets: 3
#>   Dataset occurrence.txt: [225 X 443]
#>   Dataset multimedia.txt: [15 X 1]
#>   Dataset verbatim.txt: [209 X 443]

List files in the archive

out$files
#> $xml_files
#> [1] "/Users/sckott/Library/Caches/R/finch/0000154-150116162929234/meta.xml"    
#> [2] "/Users/sckott/Library/Caches/R/finch/0000154-150116162929234/metadata.xml"
#> 
#> $txt_files
#> [1] "/Users/sckott/Library/Caches/R/finch/0000154-150116162929234/citations.txt" 
#> [2] "/Users/sckott/Library/Caches/R/finch/0000154-150116162929234/multimedia.txt"
#> [3] "/Users/sckott/Library/Caches/R/finch/0000154-150116162929234/occurrence.txt"
#> [4] "/Users/sckott/Library/Caches/R/finch/0000154-150116162929234/rights.txt"    
#> [5] "/Users/sckott/Library/Caches/R/finch/0000154-150116162929234/verbatim.txt"  
...

High level metadata for the whole archive

out$emlmeta
#> <eml packageId="6cfaaf9c-d518-4ca3-8dc5-f5aadddc0390" system="http://gbif.org" scope="system" xml:lang="en" xsi:schemaLocation="eml://ecoinformatics.org/eml-2.1.1 http://rs.gbif.org/schema/eml-gbif-profile/1.0.2/eml.xsd">
#>   <dataset>
#>     <title>GBIF Occurrence Download 0000154-150116162929234</title>
#>     <creator>
#>       <individualName>
#>         <surName>GBIF Download Service</surName>
#>       </individualName>
#>     </creator>
#>     <metadataProvider>
#>       <individualName>
#>         <surName>GBIF Download Service</surName>
#>       </individualName>
#>     </metadataProvider>
#>     <associatedParty>
#>       <organizationName>OZCAM (Online Zoological Collections of Australian Museums) Provider</organizationName>
#>       <onlineUrl>http://www.ozcam.org.au/</onlineUrl>
#>       <role>CONTENT_PROVIDER</role>
#>     </associatedParty>
#>     <associatedParty>
#>       <individualName>
...

High level metadata for each data file, there's many files, but we'll just look at one

hm <- out$highmeta
head( hm$occurrence.txt )
#>   index                                        term delimitedBy
#> 1     0         http://rs.gbif.org/terms/1.0/gbifID        <NA>
#> 2     1           http://purl.org/dc/terms/abstract        <NA>
#> 3     2       http://purl.org/dc/terms/accessRights        <NA>
#> 4     3      http://purl.org/dc/terms/accrualMethod        <NA>
#> 5     4 http://purl.org/dc/terms/accrualPeriodicity        <NA>
#> 6     5      http://purl.org/dc/terms/accrualPolicy        <NA>

You can get the same metadata as above for each dataset that went into the tabular dataset downloaded

out$dataset_meta[[1]]

View one of the datasets, brief overview.

head( out$data[[1]][,c(1:5)] )
#>      gbifID abstract accessRights accrualMethod accrualPeriodicity
#> 1  50280003       NA                         NA                 NA
#> 2 477550574       NA                         NA                 NA
#> 3 239703844       NA                         NA                 NA
#> 4 239703843       NA                         NA                 NA
#> 5 239703833       NA                         NA                 NA
#> 6 477550692       NA                         NA                 NA

You can also give dwca() a local directory, or url that contains a Darwin Core Archive.

News

finch 0.2.0

CACHING CHANGES

Caching has changed in finch. We changed to using package hoardr for managing caching. Now with hoardr on the package loading we create an object that holds methods and info about where to cache, with operating specific routes. In addition, you can set your own cache directory (and we do this in examples/tests using a temp dir instead of user dir).

The old functions dwca_cache_delete, dwca_cache_delete_all, dwca_cache_details, and dwca_cache_list are defunct and replaced with the single dwca_cache object. The dwca_cache object is an R6 object that has methods/functions and variables. See the ?dwca_cache and ?finch-defunct manual files for details.

BUG FIXES

fix to dwca_read(): ... wasn't being passed on to data.table::fread internally (#18) (#19) thanks @gustavobio !

MINOR IMPROVEMENTS

replaced Suggested package httr with crul (#16)
using markdown docs now (#24)
improvement to dwca_read() to download zip files as binary because without that wasn't working on Windows machines (#17) thanks @gustavobio !
fix for failures on CRAN: don't write to user directory in examples/tests (#23)