Organize data package

The data package

A data package forms a collection of data objects and metadata enabling understanding, use, and citation of a dataset. Metadata play an important role in understanding each object and how they relate to each other. EAL works for all digital object formats and has been used by the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) to create and manage over 500 data packages for a nearly equal number of researchers. Revising data packages with EAL is easy but requires some forethought about file organization.

An organization scheme

A useful organization scheme is a single directory for each data package containing:

• data_objects A directory of data and other digital objects to be packaged (e.g. data files, scripts, .zip files, etc.).
• metadata_templates A directory of EAL template files.
• eml A directory of EML files created by EAL.
• run_EMLassemblyline.R An R file for scripting an EAL workflow.

Run template_directories() to create this organization scheme.

An even simpler organization scheme, albeit more cluttered, is a single directory containing all files belonging to a data package. A third option is to customize file location, use the path, data.path, and eml.path arguments of EAL functions.