Welcome to MIAGIS’s documentation!

MIAGIS

MIAGIS (Minimum Information About Geospatial Information System) was created to help automate the process of creating a metadata file for GIS data depositions. It is a command line tool that goes through all files and folders in the current directory and makes a best effort to fill in all of the metadata fields for the file. The resulting metadata file is saved as GIS_METADATA.json in the current directory. It is not expected for this initially generated file to be perfect, therefore the “validate” command of MIAGIS should be used to generate a list of problems with the metadata that the user needs to address manually.

The overall expected workflow is for the user to gather all of their files for the deposition into a directory with the expected directory structure (explained below), use the “build” command of MIAGIS to create an initial metadata file, and then use the “validate” command to get a list of problems to fix and fix them until the “validate” command reports nothing.

Links

MIAGIS @ GitHub

MIAGIS @ PyPI

Documentation @ Pages

Installation

The MIAGIS package runs under Python 3.7+. Use pip to install. Starting with Python 3.4, pip is included by default. Be sure to use the latest version of pip as older versions are known to have issues grabbing all dependencies.

Install on Linux, Mac OS X

python3 -m pip install miagis

Install on Windows

py -3 -m pip install miagis

Upgrade on Linux, Mac OS X

python3 -m pip install miagis --upgrade

Upgrade on Windows

py -3 -m pip install miagis --upgrade

Quickstart

First create a directory with directories for “layer_data”, “map_data”, and “other” as necessary. Then run the “build” command.

MIAGIS has many options. The simplest use case is:

miagis build

Although this will run and generate a metadata file, MIAGIS can do a lot more by using some of the simplest options. A more common use case is:

miagis build --remove_optional_fields --add_resources --resource_properties <filepath> --base_metadata <filepath>

Detailed descriptions of the options and input files are in the tutorial.

MIAGIS’s behavior can be quite complex, so it is highly encouraged to read the guide and tutorial. There are also examples available in the examples folder on the GitHub repo.

Mac OS Note

When you try to run the program on Mac OS you may get an SSL error.

certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate

This is due to a change in Mac OS and Python. To fix it go to to your Python folder in Applications and run the Install Certificates.command shell command in the /Applications/Python 3.x folder. This should fix the issue.

License

This package is distributed under the BSD license.