This repository contains a series of documents about preparing and publishing datasets in the environmental sciences and similar contexts. Topics include community-developed metadata standards, serialization and markup formatting guidelines, and best practices for the content of published research datasets. This documentation is maintained by the Environmental Data Initiative (EDI) and all content has been developed and written in coordination with EDI's community of scientists, data managers, and repository users. There are two versions published online:
- The current production version
- A pre-release version (in development)
NOTE: Content in the current production version was originally taken from EDI's Data Package Best Practices site (repo)
The guide documents are published as a collection of Quarto books. Revisions to these guides will occur using this repository, with periodic releases and distribution of PDF copies.
This repository and the included documents are currently maintained by EDI, with major updates and new content developed and approved through community working groups. If you would like to help develop these documents please contact the maintainers and working group leads listed on the "About" page, or reach out to EDI at [email protected]. Some details on how contribution works are below.
- main: The
mainbranch holds the current production version of the documents. Documents in the main branch are published in website format with GitHub Pages in the "EDIorg" organization. This constitutes the - prerelease: The
prereleasebranch contains the in-development, "next version" of the documents. Documents in the prerelease branch are published in website format on Netlify. - feature or content branches: These may exist during the early development of new features or drafting of content. They will first be merged into the prerelease branch and they are not currently published in website form.
All documents and website content are written in Quarto markdown and the resulting.qmd files are rendered to the websites (as HTML files, ultimately). See the Quarto guide for information on how to author .qmd files. New content or edits to the documents should be submitted as a pull request to the prerelease branch. Once merged into the prerelease version, changes will be reviewed by the community and approved (or not) for inclusion in the production documents. If you would like push permission to the prerelease branch please contact the maintainers.
Both main and prerelease branches have GitHub Actions workflows configured to build and deploy their associated website any time new commits are pushed to that branch. The production site, derived from main, is published as a GitHub pages site (Quarto docs). The prerelease site, derived from the prerelease branch, is published to Netlify (Quarto docs). The GitHub Actions publishing workflow for both branches is specified in the .github/workflows/publish.yml file, which was modeled in part on the Quarto website version.