Feedback for owid-catalog

[Marigold]

I received feedback from a developer, @mgrabovsky, at a non-profit organization, Facts on Climate, which uses some of our data (and might benefit from using more!). I found it interesting, so I'm sharing it here (not sure where else to put it):

• I followed the instructions from the ETL docs, which were the only instructions I could find.
• After reading the snippet, I expected that running pip install owid would install the catalog. However, this package on PyPI is unmaintained.
• It's not clear what the channel is and why I should care.
• Fetching tables worked fine, but I had issues identifying the unique table. For instance, catalog.find("electricity_mix") returns two versions, and picking one with .iloc[] is dangerous because the order (or number of tables) is not guaranteed. I can't use catalog.find_one() because it complains about two tables.
• It would be great if I could get countries in ISO format (2/3 letters). It's a bit hard to integrate this into our work without it.
• Googling "owid API" returns an unmaintained repository here or ETL docs, neither of which help you find our API.
• Otherwise looks good!

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.