Data users— what are your use cases and requests for exporting data?

[dkaposi]

@carrieseltzer

Thanks, @nathantaylor. This is not at all beyond the initial request and is a helpful suggestion for approaching the request to offer more insight about individual identifiers in the downloads at scale. Definitely interested to hear if others would find this useful or suggest other approaches to this problem.

I can see how this would be useful, the two projects that I manage have 120,000 observations so a better way to sift thought the data would be nice. Being able to search for challenging species and then reviewing the ID providers would be beneficial. I believe that you can can export a list of traditional project observations from the “Filter by Curator Identifications”, but that doesn’t list the specific curators either. That is useful as someone may want to maintain a ‘reviewed/vetted by’ list outside of iNat.

@ekrimmel

Still, though, it would be nice if observation fields that are set up to use within a project could always be available to download from that project.

This would be a hugely helpful change, fields used in a project are far more relevant than random fields used by the individual performing the download. The current field options make sense if a user is downloading their own data, but it falls apart at a project scale.

@carrieseltzer

It’s not as clearcut as to how annotations (particularly those that can have more than one response, such as plant phenology), so we’d like to hear how you’d like to use data and what format is most useful.

My focus is on insects for downloading, so the presentation of annotations is simpler. We just need to be able to include annotations in downloads.