Preliminary Considerations for Handling User Requests

Introduction

This document describes some considerations and a very preliminary format of a potential user request. It describes possible implementations of exporting and packaging data.

A very crude and basic example describes a request to export climate data for a set of places and dates.

Structure

• name. This is a name of the request

• source. Source of the request, it can indicate a pipeline that has to be run to obtain the data or another way of building the data required for the request. Our software wil dispatch the actual reuqest based on this value. Each value has to be specifically implemented by us.

• variables. List of variables that should be included in the package given to the user. Our software will figure out how to retrieve a specified variable. If a way to retrieve a variable cannot be determined, an error will be generated. Current prototype implementation searches for columns with appropriate names in the tables defined in the module specified in the source section.

• restrict. This section specifies filters to restrict the data included in the package. Each filter is specified in the format variable: value | list of values. If a variable contains sub-variables (e.g., date has years, months, days, etc.). Then sub-variables and their values can be specified. Variables used in restrict section do not necessarily be included in the variables section.

• package. This section defines how to package the data for the user. In the example we package it as HDF5, grouping by state and date. Grouping variables must be included iin the variables section.