Data Carpentries lesson for {soilDB}

[brownag]

Data Carpentries are a style and standard for lessons on different data science applications. https://datacarpentry.org/

This is an example lesson template available on GitHub: https://carpentries.github.io/lesson-example/

Data Carpentries were brought up at the NASEM conference this week around dynamic soil data and informatics.

@ktoddbrown suggested we consider developing a Data Carpentry-styled lesson for {soilDB}, I think this is a great idea.

There are several questions we need to be able to answer in order to propose a new lesson for submission to the "Carpentries Incubator": https://github.com/carpentries-incubator/proposals

This is a stub to get discussion started. I welcome any comments or suggestions, or folks who would like to collaborate on a proposal

In the context of soilDB, I think the low hanging fruit / most bang for the buck would come from some demos of using Soil Data Access for tabular and spatial data. SDA is great since it is an official source of our products, and with recent developments has certified lab data (point observations) in addition to the SSURGO/STATSGO (geographic databases). There will likely be more offered from SDA in the future.

Some thoughts on what could go into lesson:

1. higher-level SDA functions provided by soilDB and how they relate to general soil survey "concepts" (i.e. tables v.s. hierarchical structure they represent)

   • fetchSDA, SDA_spatialQuery, fetchSDA_spatial

2. More advanced SDA schema and custom T-SQL queries with SDA_query

What is needed elsewhere in the package:

• I would like to streamline as much as possible in terms of interoperability. One thing that stands out for the spatial side of things is ensuring reasonable {sf} support, or even replacing {sp} entirely with {sf} internally, providing only conversion of {sp} inputs, or conversion of {sf} outputs as needed with sf::as_Spatial

[brownag]

The Carpentries Curriculum Development Handbook
https://cdh.carpentries.org/

[brownag]

Ideas about wrangling existing documentation, tutorials, and demonstrations

#157