Database Architect (internship) - French National Institute of Agricultural Research

2016-07-31

BléDD* objective 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.

*As a result of my DUT internship at INRA Montpellier, France (under the responsability of Patrice Buche andLuc Menut), the objective of the

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

Workflow

At first I concentrated on the structural part (Fig.1). 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.

Fig.1 - Workflow: structural point of view.

Then I worked on the data part (Fig.2).

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.

Fig.3 - Home page of the published Access database.

Fig.4 - Dynamic cross-tabulation of measures for, with options to filter data easily.