fossabot/climatedatarescue

ClimateDataRescue is inspired by the Scribe platform, a generalised transcription tool by the Zooniverse.

DRAW - Data Rescue: Archives and Weather

Contents

• Introduction
• Development Setup
  • Requirements
  • Installation
  • Configuration
  • Running the application
• User Guide
• Data Model
• Attribution and Acknowlegements

Introduction

This application seeks to aid in the digitization of paper records through the crowd-sourced transcription of scanned image files, particularly documents ill-suited for Optical Character Recognition (OCR). It specializes in recovering data stored in a highly structured format. The app fully supports multilingual localization of the user interface and the data schema organization (field labels, help texts, etc).

Administrators are given an interface with which to define their data collection schemas, and users are provided a mechanism to transcribe data contained on the page and indicate its position.

Development Setup

Software Requirements

• docker
• docker-compose

Project Installation

Installing required software

docker

docker-compose

Setup

Docker Containers

Navigate to the project directory in the terminal.

Ensure you are at the application folder and run the following script to extract the initial files and build the docker containers:

docker/build.sh

Start the database container (detached):

docker-compose up -d db

Wait 30s and check if the db container has finished initializing: It will read (healthy) when it is finished. You may need to run the following command a couple more times until you see it read healthy.

docker ps

Create the databases, load the application schema, and initialize with the seed data:

docker-compose run app rake db:setup

Add app secrets:

You need two entries in the ENV for the app, SECRET_KEY_BASE and SECRET_TOKEN.

Run the following command twice to generate secure tokens.

docker-compose run app bundle exec rake secret

Add an entry to the docker/.env.app.conffile for each key identified above, and set the values as the results of the above two rake secret commands.

Start the app container

docker-compose up app

Open another terminal and verify that the docker containers have started and that the local host's ports are mapped to the containers' ports:

docker ps

You should be able to verify that two containers draw-app and draw-db have started, and their ports are being mapped to the host machine.

Environment Variables

The environment configuration file can be found in application.rb. A sample application.yml file can be found in <rails_app_directory>\config\application-sample.yml. Once you enter in all the required values, you can rename it to application.yml.

Starting and Stopping the application

By now, the app server should already be running and accessible at localhost:3000 in your browser.

To stop the app when running in current terminal window:

CTRL/CMD + C

To start the app:

docker-compose up app

You should be able to log into the application as the admin user with the information defined in the seeds.rb file.

User Guide

Forthcoming.

Data Model

Forthcoming.

Attribution and Acknowlegements

This project was created in 2015 as my final independent study project in Geography at McGill University with Renee Sieber from the departments of Geography and Environmental Studies as my supervisor. It was developed in coordination with Victoria Slonosky in her efforts to recover data from thousands of pages of historical weather observations.

This project was inspired by the Scribe Framework.

License