Quarterly report - 2024Q4

[mbjones]

Quarterly report, 2024Q4

[regetz]

Reporting Period: 2024-10-01 - 2024-12-31

Highlights:

• Completed full load of the existing VegBank database into the new database system in the Development environment, for use in API development and testing. Completed end-to-end documentation of the process, for use when completing the future rollout to Production.
• Formalized core API resource types (e.g. plot observations, taxon observations, community classifications, plant and community concepts, projects, references, etc), and designed and documented basic request and response schemas for these resources.
• Identified candidate approaches for handling bulk uploads of resources (e.g., plot observations), with different strategies for determining how existing vs new dependent entities (e.g., parties and projects) are recognized and handled at load time.
• Evaluated and selected the software framework for API implementation, completed a rapid prototype with basic query functionality against a local test instance of the database, and began work to containerize the API engine for deployment in the hosted cluster environment (Development and Production).
• Obtained and reviewed a second sample of California vegetation plot data from VegCAMP, with samples from reconnaissance and accuracy assessment surveys.
• Continued initial exploration of California data to understand similarities and differences with the VegBank schema, as needed to begin eventual implementation of a data ingest workflow.

Issues:

• Deploy Postgres to K8s using Helm chart #33
• Complete and document DB load into Dev instance #40
• Storage Service and API #8 (continued in Q4)
• Create Flask API Kubernetes Pod #36 (initiated in Q4)
• API Phase 1: Data Retrieval MVP #41 (initiated in Q4)