Preparing the DwCA itself

Preparing your Darwin Core Archive can be relatively straightforward. However, this also assumes that you have already prepared your data and metadata to comply with Darwin Core standards. If you have not done this, please see our Darwin Core data package, corella and delma.

Initialising a Darwin Core Archive

For a Darwin Core Archive containing only a list of occurrences, the process is relatively straightforward. For this example, we will assume that all the data has been formatted to comply with Dariwn Core Archive standards, and the variable name is df. We will also assume that your metadata has been filled in, correctly rendered and is named eml.xml.

First, we will create the Darwin Core Archive object, and specify our occurrences and metadata. This will automatically assume you want to make a directory in the folder you are working in. If you want to specify a different folder, you can set the variable working_dir=<NAME>.

>>> import galaxias
>>> my_dwca = galaxias.dwca(occurrences=df,
...                         eml_xml='eml.xml')

This will create a dwca object with all of your information in one place. Now, we will create the meta.xml file.

Metadata files in a Darwin Core Archive

Darwin Core Archives require two metadata files: one to describe the dataset itself (i.e. what license is attached to it, who collected the data, etc.), and one to describe the Darwin Core Archive itself. The former is the eml.xml file you provided above, while the other is the one we will create right now. If you use the function

>>> my_dwca.make_meta_xml()

it will create a file called meta.xml in your working directory. This contains a list of the files in the archive, as well as a list of what is in the data files ( in this case, occurrences).

Creating a Darwin Core Archive

If you have not gotten any errors thus far, and are happy with your filenames being the default in galaxias, you can now run

>>> my_dwca.create_dwca()

This will produce a Darwin Core Archive titled dwca.zip, which contains the files occurrences.csv, eml.xml and meta.xml.