As a result of my DUT internship at INRA Montpellier, France (under the responsability of Patrice Buche and Luc Menut), the objective of the BléDD project was to convert tables of data from leaflets (paper and digital) into a relational database in order to allow specialists in the field to study the evolution of technological characteristics of durum wheat varieties grown in France since 1973.

VBA / SQL / format CSV / PowerAMC / MS Access 2012 / ABBYY FineReader / InkScape

Workflow

At first I concentrated on the structural part (see Figure 2.9). It was necessary to establish a data dictionary. With PowerAMC I was able to design the Access database. This database also needed some basic data in addition to the tables (for unit conversion).

Note: as this internship took place in France, all technical documentation was written in French.

Then I worked on the data part (cf. Figure 2.10).

I first focused on the digital booklets that had to be normalized in CSV form. I wrote an algorithm in VBA that imported the normalized data into the previously created database.

Publishing the data

Once the data was inserted, I created Access forms to allow third party users to view the data or export it as an Excel table. As you can see I took care of the design too, even if it was not something required explicitly.