Preparing the DwCA itself

At the end of the above process, we should have a folder named data-publish that contains at least two files:

• One or more .csv files containing data (e.g. occurrences.csv, events.csv, multimedia.csv)

• An eml.xml file containing your metadata

We can now run build_archive() to build our Darwin Core Archive!

>>> galaxias.build_archive()

Running build_archive() first checks whether we have a ‘schema’ document (meta.xml) in our data-publish folder. This is a machine-readable xml document that describes the content of the archive’s data files and their structure. The schema document is a required file in a Darwin Core Archive. If it is missing, build_archive() will build one. We can also build a schema document ourselves using use_schema().

At the end of this process, you should have a Darwin Core Archive zip file (dwca.zip) in your parent directory. You should also have a data-publish folder in your working directory containing standardised data files (e.g. occurrences.csv), a metadata statement in EML format (eml.xml), and a schema document (meta.xml).