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ropensci / unconf17

Website for 2017 rOpenSci Unconf
http://unconf17.ropensci.org
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emldown, a package for making a handy website out of EML metadata #28

Open maelle opened 7 years ago

maelle commented 7 years ago

@aammd and I both create EML using the rOpenSci EML package. Next steps after creating the EML include sharing the database documentation with users.

For this we were thinking that at the unconf we could start hacking on an emldown package which would be inspired by pkgdown. emldown would transform any valid EML into a website where the users of a database could find information about the data. The website would not need to be extremely pretty to be already extremely useful compared to sending users the xml / having them use the EML::eml_view function.

The package could also include a tool for making a PDF human-readable version of the EML for users who prefer printing the documentation.

We are not aware of the existence of similar tools. Data repositories that accept EML like KNB render EML in a pretty way, see e.g. @mbjones's comment in this issue. However, we want to have a tool allowing to read the EML without uploading the metadata anywhere (because this might happen only at a later stage)

We also think that the existence of such a package would make the use of EML even more attractive than it is today.

@cboettig @mbjones @amoeba you might be interested in this discussion.

amoeba commented 7 years ago

This is a great idea and I agree with you that it would be useful.

We already have an XSLT suite for converting EML XML->HTML but it (1) would need a bit of work to make it perfect for this use and (2) I don't know if it's feature complete w/r/t the EML spec. Happy to help on this or just link our stylesheets: https://github.com/NCEAS/eml/tree/master/style/eml

cboettig commented 7 years ago

Very cool. Wrapping some existing xslt sheets definitely sounds like a good place to start with this, particularly now that we have nice xslt utilities in R thanks to @jeroenooms

maelle commented 7 years ago

@cboettig now Jeroen is @jeroen

maelle commented 7 years ago

For future ref https://github.com/ropensci/xslt

maelle commented 7 years ago

I'm still interested in working on this if there are some potential collaborators at the unconf, if not, I'll work on this after the unconf. I had started experimenting (so little that's it's a bit embarrassing :grinning: ) here, I could produce html via xslt and the style sheets provided by @amoeba.

At the unconf it'd be nice to find a way to get a collection of html out of an EML (one for the whole database, one for each table) with links between them.

It doesn't need to be pretty for now, later one could figure out how to use existing styles for webpages (I have no experience with this). A good goal for the unconf would "just" be for the collection of html to nearly completely reproduce the content of any EML in a navigable format.

maelle commented 7 years ago

We're working in https://github.com/ropenscilabs/emldown 😸

maelle commented 6 years ago

And for the record blog post here