Create a Statistical Program from an Ecological Metadata Language Document

This page allows you to automatically create a SAS, SPSS, Matlab or R statistical program capable of reading either fixed or delimited data from a text file from an Ecological Metadata Language (EML) document.

To use the system, you need to have either the web address (URL) for the EML metadata OR the "package ID" (e.g., knb-lter-arc.1421.1) for the dataset you wish to create a program for. Needless to say, if the EML document is missing critical parts (e.g., attributeLists etc.), the programs will be incomplete.

Unless the EML document contains a direct link to the data, or if you are generating SPSS code, you may still need to do a small amount of manual editing. This is because the data file you are going to analyze will be stored (somewhere) on your computer and you need to tell the program where the data file is stored. Specific instructions will be provided along with the program

EML Processor

Generate a Statistical Program

Building Transformations into Web Pages

In addition to the web interface above, it is possible to build calls to EML transformations from inside web pages. The format for an automated URL is either :

http://www.vcrlter.virginia.edu/data/eml2/getStatProg.php?statPackage=XXX&verbose=TRUE&emlURL=http://myserver.edu/mydataseteml.xml

http://www.vcrlter.virginia.edu/data/eml2/getStatProg.php?statPackage=XXX&verbose=TRUE&knb_package=knb-lter-vcr.49.4

where XXX is the statistical package you wish the transformation for (XXX= SAS or SPSS or R or M) and the emlURL is the URL for a valid EML document in a URLencoded format and (alternatively) knb_package is the package ID for the dataset. If you want only the program, with no instructions, remove the "verbose=TRUE".

You can see examples of using these links on the VCR/LTER dataset pages by looking at the R, SPSS and SAS links with each data table. Here you can see an example

Web Services

You can also generate a program using a REST-based web service. Just use the URL:

http://www.vcrlter.virginia.edu/webservice/statprog/knb-lter-vcr.49.r

where knb-lter-vcr.49 is replaced by the package ID if the dataset you are interested in. If you use the suffix .r you will get an R statistical program, .m will get a Matlab program, .sas will give you a SAS program and .sps or .spss will get you an SPSS program.

If metadata is not yet available in the LTER Metacat server, the URL:

http://www.vcrlter.virginia.edu/webservice/statprog/myprogram.r?emlurl=http://myserver.edu/myEMLDoc.xml

can be used, where emlurl is set to the location of an EML document on the web.

Stylesheets

All stylesheets are available under an open source license via the LTERNET SVN. Improvements are welcomed!

Credits

John Porter created the SAS,R and SPSS stylesheets and web interface. Wade Sheldon created the Matlab stylesheet
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0621014. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recomendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF).