CatalogConvention: 'vetools' Catalog Convention White Sheet (Revision 3)
In vetools: Tools for Venezuelan Environmental Data

This white sheet describes the Catalog Convention of vetools package.

Catalog Convention White Sheet (Revision 3)
The purpose of this convention is to standarize the data structure used to store the environmental data and associated meta-data. All data-sets provided and processed by the vetools package that follow this convention are of class "Catalog" and are referred as "Collection"s. Each collection provides the following structure of class list:

A list of class "list" with name "catalog" where each element is composed of exactly ten standard elements and zero or more optional/extra elements. The required standard elements are:

Name
Station's name, class "character"

Altitude
Stations's altitude in metres. Some data sources lack this information an is taken to be NA

Latitude
Latitude in degrees

Longitude
Longitude in degrees, some data sources use West direction

Measure.code
Measured variable code, sometimes indicates MKS unit

Measure.unit
Measured data variable description

Install
Date of station's installation

Start
Date of start of operation of the station. Some data sources lack this information and is taken to be the same as Instalacion

State
The state of the country to which the station belongs, some sources lack this information and can be taken to be NA

Avble.yrs
A vector containing the years on which the station allegedly operated. Some source lack this information and is extracted from the measured variable and reflects those years that have at least one measurement.
One or more lists of measurement data variables, generally of class "ts". It is required that at least one be present under the name of "data".

This pair of lists ("catalog" and "data") form the collection. The two (or more) items are always of class "list" and are in direct correspondence, i.e. item n of the "catalog" corresponds to the measured variable item n in "data".

For example, suppose collection is a collection of 30 stations, then collection$catalog[[4]] element describes the measurement of collection$data[[4]].

Functions
Functions provided to read data sources are

read.HIDROX: imports Argus 1.0 data source files
read.MARN: imports M.A.R.N. files
read.MINAMB: imports EDELCA source files

These functions all return a list class "Catalog". Generally are parsed as follows:

file = system.file('tests/test-HIDROX.csv',package='vetools')
collection <- read.HIDROX(file)
names(collection$catalog[[1]])
summary(collection)
print(collection)
plot(collection)

A.M. Sajo Castelli

vetools, summary.Catalog, read.HIDROX, read.MARN, read.MINAMB.

## Not run: # This collection has only one station
Collection <- read.MARN(system.file("tests/test-MARN.dat", package="vetools"))
summary(Collection)
plot(Collection$data)
# This collection has many stations
Collection.H <- read.HIDROX(system.file("tests/test-HIDROX.csv", package="vetools"))
summary(Collection.H)
plot(Collection.H$data[[4]])
## End(Not run)