getMetadata: Get information about meta data

In RObsDat: Data Management for Hydrology and Beyond Using the Observations Data Model

Description

getMetadata allows to query entries from the meta data tables.

getID allows to find the ID for an entry from a meta table. A smart matching algorithm is used to retrieve relevant entries.

id2name is an internal function. It takes a data frame (e.g. returned from IgetDataValues) and converts each column with a name starting with ID to the name or term from the corresponding meta data table.

Usage

getMetadata(table, EXACT = FALSE, ...)
getID(table, value, remove.special.character=TRUE)
id2name(dataframe)

Arguments

table	Table name of the meta data table.
EXACT	boolean indicating whether only exact matches should be returned or partial matches of the term should be accepted.
remove.special.character	boolean indicating whether special characters should be removed when comparing. Usually, this should be turned on.
value	String describing the entry in the table.
dataframe	Data frame to be converted from ID - columns to names.
...	Additional columns to filter entries.

Details

The matching algorithm of getID first attempts to find exact matches in one of the column. If no result is obtained, partial matches and similar entries based on the Levenstein algorithm are searched.

ToDo explain use of synonyms

Value

getID returns a vector of the IDs. getMetadata returns a data frame representing the meta data table.

Author(s)

Dominik Reusser

See Also

Use CVtables to obtain a list of controlled vocabularies. See also the ODM documentation from CUAHSI

Examples

#connect to standard database
#this also retrieves the controlled vocabularies from the CUAHSI server
getDefaultDB()

#retrieve meta data
getMetadata(table="VariableName")

RObsDat documentation built on May 29, 2017, 12:07 p.m.