List of "How to ...?"

[mgravey]

Maybe a list of "How to", for very standard question, that are coming again and again. For each, the N typical solutions, and when to use each of them.

I see it in a very short format : question ==> answer, not deep discussion that is maybe more reserved for more complete tutorials

[jdbcode]

I was thinking that it would be helpful to have a section for "methods" and a section for "applications" and subsections within those. It seems your suggestion for a list of "How-to" is similar to this notion of a "methods" section - common, discrete tasks that are frequently needed by many. For these, I think a short format it fine, also with the possibility of solution variations - maybe does not require as much text as a more formal tutorial would, but I do think that they should be well-organized into categories so they are easy to find and not replicated. I have started a document with a menu structure and some philosophy I have on the matter. It might not be the best way to organize content, but I think something similar is needed so that we don't end up with a jumble of examples that are hard to find, which is sort of what is happening in the forum. In any case, starting a list of what these common questions are would be really useful. Should we start a list here in this "issue"? Perhaps people from various fields of study can include common tasks/questions - I'll think about what these might be for some of my work and include them here.

[mgravey]

Maybe first even splitting between the "science" from the "technical" methodology. Let me clarify what I mean, it's an opinion:

• The technical issues, we can go straight to the goal.
  How to export an ImageCollection ?
  Solution 1, if all your image cover you study areas: you don't export the collection but go for toBands() ...
  Solution 2, you have an image for each year, you do a loop and export manually...
  solution3 ....
  How to do processing on each image of a collection ?
  You use the map() function, and you add your new bands to the original image (using addBands() ) to don't lose the metadata ...
  Because at the end of the day, whatever the solution we use the result of any computation should be the same.

• On the other side "science" methodology, it would be better to have a tutorial, because it's important to know the consequences of choices, I can imagine thousands of solutions to remove the cloud in an imageCollection, and it starts easily with shadow / no shadow ?, have we a quality bands available? ...
  Because, regarding the solution we are choosing, it's possible that some consequences are important for what we are studying.

[jdbcode]

I like this idea! Just to be clear the structure would be something like this, then?

• Methods
  • Generic
    • Collection to bands
    • Discontinuous (interval) image collection building
    • Export non-spatial data strcuture as JSON (GeoJSON)
    • "e.g common reduction task~
    • "e.g common export task~
  • Specific
    • Cloud masking Landsat (more of a tutorial including context, variations, and considerations)
    • Cloud masking Sentinal-2 (more of a tutorial including context, variations, and considerations)
    • etc
• Applications (tutorials/examples of science applications eg map and summarize forest change for a region)

I also like the idea of short format question/answer. At least early on, if we want people to participate, it needs to be really easy and quick for them to submit content. Even if it is not as detailed as we'd like, it would provide a base for others to edit and build from. It needs to look like people are participating and adding content - eg if you go to a party and no one is there and the music is low, you're not going to stay. 😄

[schnjaso2]

Thinking of presentation, are we thinking of a platform to show this content? Descartes Labs uses readthedocs.io, but certainly there are other options. Sphinx is pretty cool too, and I suppose we could just use github if we wanted to be vanilla.

I suppose this being a Google product, ultimately we should use whatever they have. Gerrit?

This browser is kind of cool and might be able to be adapted to be a documentation presentation platform https://github.com/radiantearth/stac-browser

This is cool too
https://github.com/Open-EO/openeo-processes-docgen

[jdbcode]

@schnjaso2 I started a new issue for the topic of platform. #4