Welcome to the WAter Data Exchange (WADE). This Data Exchange relies upon the connections between groups' repositories, so in order to participate, you need to fork this repository.
This project is designed to be easy to contribute, and easy to use. If you find any friction points, please contact Foundry Spatial at [email protected].
Forking this project will also give you a website page at a URL that looks like this: https://<username>.github.io/<projectname>/. For example, this project has a website page here: https://foundry-spatial.github.io/WADE/, which was generated from the index.md file in the docs directory - Modify as you like but please keep the --- lines at the top of file, or your page won't get generated. Read more about github pages.
If you haven't created an account for github already, please follow their instructions at https://github.com/join. Once you have confirmed your email and account information, please visit this repository again, or refresh your browser.
To fork this repository, click on Fork in the top right corner of this page.
The easiest way to use github on Windows/*nix/MacOS is to install the github desktop client. You may find this at https://desktop.github.com/
You may also want to use the native git client - to do so, follow the instructions at https://git-scm.com/book/en/v1/Getting-Started-Installing-Git
You will need to "clone" your newly created repository (which should be located somewhere like https://github.com/<yourname>/WADE).
This will put a copy of the repository on your local system, which you may then add to and/or edit.
Once you have finished editing, add any changed files, and commit. You will then need to "push" your changes to github.
Water data can naturally be divided into two components:
- information on the location where it is collected - location name, coordinates, type of feature, instrument used, etc…
- associated with specific monitoring events, include the date, time, parameter measured, detection limit, units, and measured value.
Simple (yet extendable) data files are included in the data folder. You may extend the data as required as long as these basic data characteristics are maintained.
This file contains any "metadata" you wish to have for the system. This may include but is not limited to: group name, group contributors, contact email, &c. Please modify the metadata.csv file to reflect your working group's information, and add any other data as required (as columns).
This file contains unique station/location ids, and their corresponding names, as well as their geospatial location, either as a point (latitude, longitude values) or alternatively a geojson shape (column "Geometry"), where coordinates are in latitude and longitude (not in metres), preferably in WGS84, also known as EPSG: 4326 projection. Should you wish to have some other information on a per-location basis, (e.g. collection method, region, etc.) simply add more columns. Please note: LocationID must be unique in this locations.csv file.
All other files in the data directory will be considered as "observational data". In other words, you may separate out your CSV in whichever way you choose, as long as it makes sense to you. However, there needs to be the following columns for any of these files:
- location id, which must correspond to a location ID in
data/locations.csv. - date or datetime (with time zone, if possible) in ISO 8601 standard format - e.g.
2007-03-01T13:00:00Z,2017-12-31,2017-12-31T13:59:59+08:00
Please look at the example data/observations.csv file included in this repository - you should note that observation parameters are per row, and the parameter type and unit measurement are separate columns.
Github has a built in mapping system, where, if you supply valid geojson formatted files, it will map out points and geometry. Most mapping software has the ability to export into geojson. There are free converters of popular formats to geojson online as well. Read more about GeoJSON..
- Github: A website to make contributions of data and software easier. Github is commonly used for a large number of open source software and data projects.
- Repository: A repository is a collection of data/text. In the context of WADE, it is a repository which is forked from the original
Foundry-Spatial/WADErepository. Commonly shortened to "repo". - WADE: WADE is an acronym for WAter Data Exchange. This is intended to be a system for citizen science water observation publishing.
- git: Git is a software versioning system developed for open source. It is a system for keeping track of changes in software development, but it works just as well for text and data. For the most part, you shouldn't have to worry about how it works or how to use it.
- License: A licence in the context of this repository