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delma

Overview

delma is a package for converting metadata statements written in markdown, RMarkdown or Quarto markdown to Ecological Meta-language (EML). It is named for a genus of legless lizards that are endemic to Australia, whose name happens to contain the letters 'e', 'm' and 'l'.

The logo depicts a striped legless lizard (Delma impar) in the style of the classic mobile game 'snake', a play on the observation that Delma are often mistaken for snakes. It was drawn by Martin Westgate.

If you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please contact us.

Installation

This package is under active development, and is not yet available on CRAN. You can install the latest development version from GitHub with:

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("AtlasOfLivingAustralia/delma")

Load the package:

library(delma)

Basic usage

The primary use case for delma is to manipulate the format of metadata statements for sharing biodiversity data. The first step is to create a markdown file, and add any headings that you like that conform to the EML standard. The header 'level' (i.e. number of #) is used to designate the degree of nesting. If you don't want to start from scratch, you can use the example dataset provided:

library(dplyr)
use_metadata()
#> [1] FALSE

It is straightforward to export this to your working directory using write_md():

write_md(metadata_example, "metadata.md")

Once you are done, import it to R using read_md(). It will be stored as a tibble:

x <- read_md("metadata.md")
x 

You can then export it as an xml file without any intermediate steps:

write_eml(x, "metadata.xml")

For a more detailed description of delma's capabilities and methods, see the 'Quick start guide' vignette.

Citing delma

To generate a citation for the package version you are using, you can run:

citation(package = "delma")

The current recommended citation is:

Westgate MJ, Balasubramaniam S & Kellie D (2024) delma: Convert markdown files to EML. R Package version 0.1.0.