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  • About Global Great Lakes

    • Data Preferences

    When you download data from or save links to this site, there are some options about how those links and data look.

    Tables

    These can be wide, or narrow.  For example, a wide table for Creel Count and Harvest Rate for Management Units MI-6 and MI-7 would look like this:

    year,month,MI-7:Creel count,MI-7:Harvest rate,MI-6:Creel count,MI-6:Harvest rate
2003,,109.51,0.006308,68.65,0.0014745
2004,,87.85,0.0045273,18.79,0.00039814
    ...

    whereas the corresponding narrow table would look like this:

    year,month,place,attribute,value
    2003,,MI-7,Creel count,109.51
    2003,,MI-7,Harvest Rate,0.006308
2003,,MI-6,Creel count,68.65
    2003,,MI-6,Harvest Rate,0.0014745
    2004,,MI-7,Creel count,87.85
    ...

    If there are different taxa in the data, the wide format headings become ::, eg. MI-6:Creel count:1230101099, and the narrow format includes it as an additional column.

    Which one you want depends on what you're going to do with the data.  Another option is to receive the data in JSON format, useful for reading directly into other web applications.  If you've never heard of JSON, it's probably not the format you want.

    URLS

    Links to data and plots on this site also come in two flavors, "permanent", and "readable".  Permanent URLs won't break if we tweak the name of a place or a variable, but you can't interpret them independently.  They're not guaranteed to be truely permanent, but they're more robust than "readable" URLs.  Readable URLS have an obvious structure, and can be manipulated to automatically select different data sets.  But, they might break if place or variable names change.

    Permanent form:
    http://www.globalgreatlakes.org/ggl/plot/LOCI/598/62/ATTR/61/152
    Readable form:
    http://www.globalgreatlakes.org/ggl/plot/LOCI/S45004/SU08M/ATTR/Surface%20temp,%20mean/Temp%20Five%20Meter

    Data can be accessed directly using urls:

    Wide table:
    http://www.globalgreatlakes.org/ggl/data/LOCI/598/62/ATTR/61/152?data_format=wide
    Narrow table:
    http://www.globalgreatlakes.org/ggl/data/LOCI/598/62/ATTR/61/152?data_format=narrow
JSON data:
    http://www.globalgreatlakes.org/ggl/data/LOCI/598/62/ATTR/61/152?data_format=json

    You can use the form below to save your preferences for data and url formats for the links on the plot page for this session.