Retreiving GWSI well construction information with R

[stprinos]

Under the dataRetrieval package there is a script for retrieving the Site File information. This is great, but I need to retrieve information about the open interval of wells, rather than just well depth. Has anyone developed anything to pull well construction (and perhaps other) information from GWSI. If so could you direct me to this script.

If not, then I think this would be an important improvement to add.

[ldecicco-USGS]

My understanding is that the GWSI is a USGS-internal only service. So it would be difficult to create a function in the dataRetrieval package. This did remind me though that we wanted to add functions to get water level data from the National Ground-Water Monitoring Network.

http://cida.usgs.gov/ngwmn/

Being completely unfamiliar with GWSI, is there a way to export the Site File information. If that output was pretty standard, we could write a script to read in that file to R.

[stprinos]

Normally you use option 6 of the GWSI menu to retrieve tables of information. This option runs you through a series of menu options to get what you want.

I used to make a file that had all the responses that you type for each of the menu options in the software. For example if the retrieval software asked if you wanted option 1, 2, or 3, you would just put a 3 in the file if you wanted option 3. Then you would turn this file into an executable and it would output the data whenever you needed the same retrieval.

This was not a very efficient way of doing it, because when they revised the software and perhaps added a new option it would throw everything off.

I believe others use SQL to query the database directly, which would be a much more efficient method, if it could dovetailed into an R-package but I believe that may require a special level of database access. I have not done this except a little bit in a training class years ago.