option to download data for a specific alert setting

[timadriaens]

A user feature request from the practitioners workshop on digitisation was to provide a download data option for specific alerts so people could use these data in their own (mostly gis based) systems.

[damianooldoni]

Notice that @niconoe has already created a WFS to make these data available for GIS based systems. This is a feature requested by POV, see #65

The service is available at https://alert.riparias.be/api/wfs/observations

There are some remarks open, see #268.

I don't close this issue, as it is about exporting (via WFS or via a basic download) occurrences linked to a specific alert.

[niconoe]

Hello @timadriaens , I am currently going back to this and I was wondering what was the exact format that would be the most useful for this.

On one hand, I am tempted to also use WFS (the current system returns all the observations, but we could improve it so it allows to return only observations for a specific alert). We would use the exact same response for both cases, except that in the second case the data is filtered. That would make things very consistent.

On the other hand, if the end-users can't/don't want to deal with WFS and want a simpler format (CSV for example) it would be good to know in advance.

[damianooldoni]

My two cents extra for @timadriaens. We could (actually SHOULD) document how to get data from the WFS so that it's accessible to "common" people. Once I had to download WFS data which actually resolved to a direct download of a csv!
So, my opinion is to implement it as WFS as indeed it makes things way more consistent (and way less work for @niconoe).

[timadriaens]

I think WFS would be excellent, the question came specifically from people that were thinking of retreiving the data they want in their own gis systems so I think that would be the way to go. Of course, there will also be a (potentially larger) audience wanting to use csv, but thinking of that, they could perfectly be directed to gbif to do a proper download of the data in the format they want there? Perhaps building a download system on top of a system that already has one is not so efficient.