Snapshot Creation

VERTNET SNAPSHOTS CREATION PROCESS:

  1. VertNet assembles its datastore into BigQuery, a Google tool, with which we run queries over the complete VertNet index.
  2. From these queries we create taxon-based snapshots - Amphibia, Aves, Fishes*, Mammalia, and Reptilia (additional datasets may be produced in the future).
  3. These snapshots are converted into CSV (comma-separated) text files and compressed into .zip files.
  4. VertNet generates a metadata** file that describes the contents contained within each zipped dataset.
  5. Finally, we bundle up the metadata and the dataset and upload them to CyVerse.
  • Yes, we understand that “fish” is a paraphyletic assemblage, but for the sake of simplicity and to avoid a ton of “fish-related resources” we have bundled everything to “fish”.

** The metadata we create is in the same format we use for any other resource in VertNet.

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background: “https://inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com/photos/147435900/original.jpg” imageLicense: “Gulo gulo (Linnaeus, 1758) observed in Finland by yucbac (licensed under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.))”