2020-01-26 GLOBE API - Change Announcement - GLOBE Data User Guide
GLOBE Data User Guide
To discover all the various ways to use GLOBE data, download the GLOBE Data User Guide (PDF) (version 2.0, effective 30 December 2022).
Learn how to access and interpret GLOBE data with this Data User Guide. Inside, members can find appendices on GLOBE's associated metadata, the types of variables available for download, primers on our different protocols and more.
GLOBE data is collected and submitted by GLOBE-trained teachers, students and citizen scientists. GLOBE also collects additional data from automated weather stations and individual data loggers. Through the hard work of these participants, over 200 million measurements have been logged into GLOBE archives and made available for public use.
Version 1.0 of the Data User Guide is available for reference.
26 January 2020
Summary of Changes:
We are modifying the GLOBE API so that variables currently output as strings are output as integers, floats and booleans. This will provide data type consistency between the source files, ADAT data, and Elasticsearch data stores. We are upgrading the servers associated with the GLOBE API to improve performance and stability.
Affected Systems:
Primarily - GLOBE API
Secondarily - The GLOBE database will be under greater than usual load which may impact overall system performance.
Secondarily - The GLOBE Advanced Data Access Tool (ADAT) may return incomplete data for a given protocol when that protocol is being processed. Users will be informed which protocol is being processed on the ADAT main page.
Affected Protocols:
All GLOBE protocols
Affected Users:
All users who currently consume data from the GLOBE API may be affected. Users of GLOBE's ADAT tool may be intermittently affected.
Planned Timeline:
Data Migration in Production: 22 January 2020 - 26 January 2020
Test and Validation of new server environment: 26 January 2020 - 30 January 2020
New API server "live" in production - 30 January 2020
Send Comments to: help@globe.gov
Discussion
The current implementation of Elasticsearch (which drives the GLOBE API) returns data in GeoJSON or JSON formats. Both formats have the capability to allow JSON values to have the simple data types string (with double-quotes), number (integers and floats), boolean (true or false, without double-quotes), and null. However, all JSON values within the GLOBE API "data" subset are being returned as strings (which include numbers and booleans). For example, the userId is currently output as a string when it should be an integer. The planned changes will modify records which are currently incorrectly output as strings to their appropriate numeric or boolean format.
For example, JSON is currently being returned that looks like:
{"data": {
"string_field": "GLOBE",
"integer_field": "100",
"float_field": "23.45",
"boolean_field": "f",
"boolean_field_2": "false"}
}
After this change, it will look like:
{"data": {
"string_field": "GLOBE",
"integer_field": 100,
"float_field": 23.45,
"boolean_field": false,
"boolean_field_2": false}
}
Impact
It is possible if you have written a program to read from the API that this change may impact your program's ability to read the data.