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SAEON ODP Data Submission Guidance
The SAEON Open Data Platform (ODP) is a catalogue of South African earth and environmental observation data. Information on submitting data can be found here.
Metadata
The DataCite schema is used to determine the minimum metadata for the SAEON ODP. The data submission form on the Submit data page will be used to capture metadata or a metadata template will be sent to data providers who don't use the form. There is guidance included in both the form and the template to assist data providers in filling it in. If any additional questions come up the data curators will assist.
Data formats and formatting
Please ensure that you have formatted your data according to the recommended formats and guidance below before submitting it.
| Data type | Recommended file formats | Additional guidance |
| Documents | Plain text (.txt), PDF (.pdf) | |
| Tabular data | Comma separated values (.csv) | Tabular data should be formatted in accordance with Hadley Wickham's tidy data principles doi.org/10.18637/jss.v059.i10. |
| Geospatial data | Shapefile (.shp, including .shx and .dbf), GeoTIFF (.tiff and .tfw) | |
| Multidimensional | NetCDF (.nc) | Refer to SAEON's NetCDF Guidance. |
| Time series data | Relational database (SQL), Comma separated values (.csv), Plain text (.txt) | |
| Images | TIFF (.tiff) | |
| Audio | Wav (.wav) | |
| Video | Quicktime (.mov), Mpeg 4 (.mp4) |
Data submissions workflow
