What is Gulo?

Gulo is the genus for wolverine, the biggest land-dwelling species of weasel on the planet. It is a stocky and muscular carnivore, resembling a small bear. The wolverine has a reputation for endurance, ferocity, and strength out of proportion to its size, with the capacity to battle with competitors many times its size.

Gulo is also a VertNet project designed for harvesting Darwin Core Archives, shredding them into small pieces, and loading them into CartoDB. It's written in the Clojure programming language and rides on Cascading and Cascalog for processing "Big Data" on top of Hadoop using MapReduce.

Developing

AWS credentials

Running Gulo queries with Elastic MapReduce requires adding the following to the file credentials.json in the project root:

{
   "access-id": "your_aws_access_id",
   "private-key":"your_aws_private_key",
   "key-pair-file":"~/.ssh/vertnet.pem",
   "key-pair":"vertnet"
}

Working with the gulo.cdb namespace requires this to be stored in resources/aws.json:

{
    "access-id": "your_aws_access_id",
    "secret-key": "your_aws_private_key"
}

CartoDB OAuth credentials

Gulo depends on an authenticated connection to CartoDB. This requires adding the following file in resources/creds.json:

{
  "key": "your_cartodb_oauth_key",
  "secret": "your_cartodb_oauth_secret",
  "user": "your_cartodb_username",
  "password": "your_cartodb_password"
}

Dependencies

For adding BOM bytes to UTF-8 files, so that CartoDB can detect the encoding, we use the uconv program which can be installed on Ubuntu like this:

$ sudo apt-get install apt-file
$ sudo apt-file update
$ apt-file search bin/uconv
$ sudo apt-get install libicu-dev