geoflow: Orchestrate Geospatial (Meta)Data Management Workflows and Manage FAIR Services

geoflow is a standard R package that provides an engine to facilitate the orchestration and execution of metadata-driven data management workflows, in compliance with 'FAIR' (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data management principles. By means of a pivot metadata model, relying on the 'DublinCore' standard (<https://dublincore.org/>), a unique source of metadata can be used to operate multiple and inter-connected data management actions. Users can also customise their own workflows by creating specific actions but the library comes with a set of native actions targeting common geographic information and data management, in particular actions oriented to the publication on the web of metadata and data resources to provide standard discovery and access services.

At first, default actions of the library were meant to focus on providing turn-key actions for geospatial (meta)data:

1. by creating manage geospatial (meta)data complying with 'ISO/TC211' (<https://committee.iso.org/home/tc211>) and 'OGC' (<https://www.ogc.org/standards/>) geographic information standards (eg 19115/19119/19110/19139) and related best practices (eg. 'INSPIRE'); and
2. by facilitating extraction, reading and publishing of standard geospatial (meta)data within widely used software that compound a Spatial Data Infrastructure ('SDI'), including spatial databases (eg. 'PostGIS'), metadata catalogues (eg. 'GeoNetwork', 'CSW' servers), data servers (eg. 'GeoServer'). 

The library was then extended to actions for other domains: 

1. biodiversity (meta)data standard management including handling of 'EML' metadata, and their management with 'DataOne' servers,
2. in situ sensors, remote sensing and model outputs (meta)data standard management by handling part of 'CF' conventions, 'NetCDF' data format and 'OPeNDAP' access protocol, and their management with 'Thredds' servers,
3. generic / domain agnostic (meta)data standard managers ('DublinCore', 'DataCite'), to facilitate the publication of data within (meta)data repositories such as 'Zenodo' (<https://zenodo.org>) or DataVerse (<https://dataverse.org/>).

The execution of several actions will then allow to cross-reference (meta)data resources in each action performed, offering a way to bind resources between each other (eg. reference 'Zenodo' 'DOI' in 'GeoNetwork'/'GeoServer' metadata, or vice versa reference 'GeoNetwork'/'GeoServer' links in 'Zenodo' or 'EML' metadata). The use of standardized configuration files ('JSON' or 'YAML' formats) allow fully reproducible workflows to facilitate the work of data and information managers.

geoflow is available on CRAN https://cran.r-project.org/package=geoflow