This page allows you to automatically create a SAS, SPSS 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.
Once you create a program, you will 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. For this reason, you need to replace the string "PUT-LOCAL-PATH-TO-DATA-FILE-HERE" with the path to the file on your system (e.g., c:\my data\dataset1.csv).
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/getXXX.php?emlURL=http://myserver.edu/mydataseteml.xmlor
http://www.vcrlter.virginia.edu/data/eml2/getXXX.php?knb_package=knb-lter-vcr.49.4where XXX is the statistical package you wish the transformation for (XXX= sas or spss or r) 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.
You can see examples of using these links on the VCR/LTER dataset pages by looking at the R, SPSS and SAS links on the top of each dataset. Here you can see an example
All stylesheets are available under an open source license via the LTERNET CVS. Improvements are welcomed!