galaxias

Overview

galaxias is an R package that helps users describe, package and share biodiversity information using the ‘Darwin Core’ data standard. It was created by the Science & Decision Support Team at the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA).

The package is named for a genus of freshwater fish that is found only in the Southern Hemisphere, and predominantly in Australia and New Zealand.

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/galaxias")

Load the package:

library(galaxias)

Features

galaxias contains tools to:

• Create a new RStudio project or package for storing biodiversity data and data-processing scripts using galaxias_project().
• Create documents to describe the origin and structure of your data using build_metadata() and build_schema().
• Zip up your data for sharing or publication using build_archive().
• Check data for consistency with the Darwin Core standard, either locally using check_archive(), or via API using validate_archive().

galaxias is part of a group of packages that help users publish data using the Darwin Core standard. The other packages are:

• corella for converting tibbles to the required column names
• paperbark for converting markdown files to xml.

Citing galaxias

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

citation(package = "galaxias")

The current recommended citation is:

Westgate MJ, Balasubramaniam S & Kellie D (2024) galaxias: Standardise, Document and Share Biodiversity Data. R Package version 0.1.0.9999.

Contributors

Developers who have contributed to galaxias are listed here (in alphabetical order by surname):

Amanda Buyan (@acbuyan), Fonti Kar (@fontikar), Peggy Newman (@peggynewman) & Andrew Schwenke (@andrew-1234)