setup JSON/POST interface to Soil Data Access in Python

[dylanbeaudette]

Soil Data Access provides a web-service interface to the official copy of SSURGO and STATSGO. Data are requested via JSON chunks (HTTP/POST) containing valid SQL statements, in the T-SQL dialect.

There are several options for requesting data:

• SDA website / interactive form
• HTTP/POST request
• soilDB::SDA_query()

I would be happy to go over the implementation in R with a python dev--it shouldn't take more than 15 minutes to figure out a rough python function that accomplishes the same thing. It would be nice to have this available to folks during the workshop as SSURGO (the detailed soil survey) is incredibly useful and SDA can deliver data very quickly. I'll go over some of the details in my talk.

[emiliom]

Thanks @dylanbeaudette. @lsetiawan can't help with this today.

If @ocefpaf thinks he can help, he can chime in. But as we discussed on the phone a few minutes ago, the people who are most likely to jump on this to try it out are probably ones who are already heavy R users. I assume they will know how to install on their computers from either CRAN or github.

As for leveraging SDA, for R it's taken care of. We talked about leveraging in Python, but I didn't get around to discussing it with you in advance; and from what I recall many of the web services king of assume some non-trivial understanding of the data structures behind the SSURGO and STAGSO datasets. Any way, we'll see what we can do after your presentation. Maybe some of us will be able to hack something together in a Python Jupyter notebook for use by participants in the second day.