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What is the relationship between ulmo and this project? #8
Description
Ulmo is a project that sounds like it has a similar goal to dataRetrieval. It might be cool to see if this project could contribute a more robust NWIS module to ulmo.
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emiliom commentedon Apr 8, 2020
I just learned about this package. I'm not an R user, so I don't use
dataRetrievalper say; but I've known about it for a long time and it looks fantastic.ulmodoes have "robust" (*) NWIS access services, including a decent test battery integrated on its Travis CI. ulmo also has been around for a fairly long time (as these things go), so I'd say it's fairly widely used.I've been the maintainer effectively since Spring 2019. All credit for the ulmo nwis reader, and ulmo in general, go to the original ulmo developers and the many contributors over the years. For the intrepid or CUAHSI fans it's also worth pointing out that NWIS data are also available from ulmo via the CUAHSI HIS/WOF readers.
FYI I was working towards a new release in late January but got seriously derailed. It's all but complete, except for some additional documentation updates, possible deprecation of one of the readers, and other house cleaning. I've been meaning to complete the release ASAP, maybe by next week.
I'd be happy to describe the strengths and weaknesses of ulmo in general as I see them, circa 2020 April. You can get some sense of its soul searching since late 2018 on this closed issue.
It's also worth pointing out another Python NWIS implementation, hydrofunctions. I'm pinging its developer @mroberge. 3 separate NWIS Python implementations is definitely a call for some community discussion and alignment of efforts.
(*) It's only as robust as the bugs that are reported by users and how quickly we can fix them! But this recently closed issue speaks well of the user community, I think -- and thanks to @jkreft-usgs for adding an chiming in officially on the topic.
emiliom commentedon Apr 8, 2020
On another note, I've been interested in adding WQP/WQX functionality to ulmo, but it's never been a priority, unfortunately. Great to see the WQP focus here. I think I see that WQX parsing is not yet within the scope of this package, but FYI this parser is worth looking into. It would take some effort to disentangle it from the aspects that are tightly integrated into the parent package, pyoos (which is effectively deprecated), but still. Though, with progress being made on the WQP API, @jkreft-usgs has discouraged me in the past from diving into full WQX parsing.
mroberge commentedon Apr 9, 2020
Hi, I'm the developer for hydrofunctions. Thanks for pinging me! Hydrofunctions grew out of code I was using to download and process NWIS data.
My goal was to maintain the NWIS funtionality (like keeping the data quality flags) while making it easy for my non-Python students to use (informative error messages; resampling datasets with different frequencies). I've tried to have extensive testing and documentation.
I've seen the R dataRetrieval- it's great! I'm not familiar with this 'dataretrieval' project.
On the Python side, WellApplication uses some code from hydrofunctions and has the ability to parse other data sources. Hydrofunctions gets used as a dependency for tabs.
I'd love to talk about organizing or cooperating in the future. I'm sure there are others out there too. Let me know how I can contribute.
thodson-usgs commentedon Jul 25, 2023
dataretrieval focuses on USGS water data and is supported directly by USGS. We're happy to see overlap with other projects as they all make USGS data more accessible, which is a good thing. Healthy community-supported packages are a good thing. But so is having better well-supported tools from the data originators.