Getting attribute table from WFS data source

Question

I am attempting to get some WFS 2.0 INSPIRE data from the Finnish meteorological institute into a table format of some kind. Is there any software which can easily grab the attribute data for the WFS features I request? Currently, I am just running the queries from the browser but I am not very familiar with XML so I am having difficulties parsing the resulting document (I'm using R) into a useable format. I need a significant amount of historical information which generally precludes doing this in excel, although I may have to do that if I can't figure out another way to do it. I've also tried to grab the geo features directly in QGIS with the WFS 2.0 plugin, but always seem to get a 'bad request' server response when attempting to execute a stored query. Is there a simple way to get the data from the XML document into a tabular format, or a way to parametrize my own query to get the data I need and nothing else?

If you are interested in trying the service, you need to register an API key which is free.

http://en.ilmatieteenlaitos.fi/open-data-manual-fmi-wfs-services

Answer 1

Got it working using the fmi package in R.

https://github.com/rOpenGov/fmi/blob/master/vignettes/fmi_tutorial.md

Answer 2

Try the fmi R package from rOpenGov. This is an example partly from their tutorial and ran for me just fine:

install.packages(c("devtools", "sp", "rgdal", "raster")) # if you haven't
library(devtools)
install_github("rOpenGov/rwfs")
install_github("rOpenGov/fmi")
library(fmi)
library(sp)

apiKey <- "ENTER YOUR API KEY HERE"

request <- FMIWFSRequest$new(apiKey=apiKey)
request$setParameters(request="getFeature", 
                  storedquery_id="fmi::observations::weather::daily::timevaluepair",
                  starttime="2014-01-01T00:00:00Z",
                  endtime="2014-01-01T00:00:00Z",
                  bbox="19.09,59.3,31.59,70.13",
                  parameters="rrday,snow,tday,tmin,tmax")

client <- FMIWFSClient$new(request=request)
layers <- client$listLayers()
response <- client$getLayer(layer=layers[1], crs="+proj=longlat +datum=WGS84", swapAxisOrder=TRUE, parameters=list(splitListFields=TRUE))

names(response) # list attributes
[1] "fid"                                                    
[2] "gml_id"                                                 
[3] "beginPosition"                                          
[4] "endPosition"                                            
[5] "timePosition"                                           
[6] "value"                                                  
[7] "identifier"                                             
[8] "name1"                                                  
[9] "name2"                                                  
[10] "name3"                                                  
[11] "region"                                                 
[12] "time"                                                   
[13] "result_MeasurementTimeseries_point_MeasurementTVP_value"

# table with coordinates and attributes
mytable <- (cbind(coordinates(response), (response@data[-2])))

head(mytable)
  coords.x2 coords.x1                          fid        beginPosition....
1  19.90344  60.12475 PointTimeSeriesObservation.0 2014-01-01T00:00:00Z
2....