Working together to push science forward
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With the US government shut down, many of the federal government provided data APIs are down. We write R packages to interact with many of these APIs. We have been tweeting about what APIs that are down related to R pacakges we make, but we thought we would write up a proper blog post on the issue. NCBI services are still up! NCBI is within NIH, which is within the Department of Health and Human Services....
To help you use rOpenSci packages we put tutorials up on our site at /tutorials. Up to now, we created them with combination of raw html + converting code blocks to html and inserting them, etc. – it was a slow process to update them when changes happened in our packages. So we thought of a better plan… Recently CRAN started accepting R package vignettes (basically, tutorials built in to packages) in R Markdown format....
Just a quick note that the Task View we have been working on with others Web Technologies and Services is up on CRAN now. Find it here https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/WebTechnologies.html. This is the first version - there are definitely changes to come. Changes are being suggested as I write this on Twitter… The draft version of the task view is on Github here if you want to file an issue. We use many packages to do stuff with the web like XML, RCurl, httr, RJSONIO, etc....
There is an increasing set of R packages for interacting with the web from R, whether it be the low level tools to interact with the web via http (see RCurl and httr), parsing data from the web (like RJSONIO and XML), or wrappers to web APIs that provide data (like twitteR). Most of you probably know about CRAN Task Views that aggregate information about R packages and functions on a particular subject area into a simple web page....
Good discovery tools for sotware are important as they can facilitate the pace of software development, bugs are found and squashed and new features added more quickly, and users find software they need faster. We have a page on our website for our packages that provides an overview of the packages we have, with descriptions and links. Two other ways to discover things include A gallery of examples, or use cases, in which the entry point is something someone would want to do....
Happy rOpenSci users can be found at