Working together to push science forward
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at
We’re happy to announce the launch of a CRAN-style repository for rOpenSci at http://packages.ropensci.org This repository contains the latest nightly builds from the master branch of all rOpenSci packages currently on GitHub. This allows users to install development versions of our software without specialized functions such as install_github(), allows dependencies not hosted on CRAN to still be resolved automatically, and permits the use of update.packages(). Using the repository To use, simply add packages....
Despite the hype around “big data”, a more immediate problem facing many scientific analyses is that large-scale databases must be assembled from a collection of small independent and heterogeneous fragments – the outputs of many and isolated scientific studies conducted around the globe. Collecting and compiling these fragments is challenging at both political and technical levels. The political challenge is to manage the carrots and sticks needed to promote sharing of data within the scientific community....
There are many different databases. The most familiar are row-column SQL databases like MySQL, SQLite, or PostgreSQL. Another type of database is the key-value store, which as a concept is very simple: you save a value specified by a key, and you can retrieve a value by its key. One more type is the document database, which instead of storing rows and columns, stores blobs of text or even binary files....
There are two things that make R such a wonderful programming environment - the vast number of packages to access, process and interpret data, and the enthusiastic individuals and subcommunities (of which rOpenSci is a great example). One, of course, flows from the other: R programmers write R packages to provide language users with more features, which makes everyone’s jobs easier and (hopefully!) attracts more users and more contributions. But what if you have an idea, or a need, but not the time or confidence to write a package for it?...
rOpenSci specializes in creating R libraries for accessing data resources on the web from R. Most times you request data from the web in R with our packages, you should have no problem. However, you evenutally will run into problems. In addition, there are advanced things you can do modifying requests to web resources that fall in the advanced stuff category. Underlying almost all of our packages are requests to web resources served over the http protocol via curl....
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at