by Joseph Rickert
Over the past few months, a number of new CRAN packages have appeared that make it easier for R users to gain access to curated data. Most of these provide interfaces to a RESTful API written by the data publishers while a few just wrap the data set inside the package. Some of the new packages are only very simple, one function wrappers to the API. Others offer more features providing functions to control searches and the format of the returned data. Some of the packages require a user to first obtain login credentials while others don’t.
Here are 17 packages that connect to data sources of all sorts. It is by no means complete. New packages in this class seem to be arriving daily at CRAN.
ameco V 0.1: Contains the entire European Commission Annual macro-economic (AMECO) database. The vignette shows a nice example of data munging to get a plot of population data.
censusr V0.0.2: Provides an interface to the US Census Data API. The vignette shows exactly how to go about getting the key to use the API.
ckanr V 0.1.0: Provides and interface to the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network CKAN which bills itself as the “world’s leading open-source data portal platform”. The vignette walks you through installation and provides some examples.
dieZeit V 0.1.0 Provides access to Die Zeit’s online content. This includes archives going back to 1946! The vignette shows how to get API access with a limit of 10,000 accesses per day.
ecb V0.1: Provides an interface to the European Central Bank’s Statistical Warehouse API. The following plot from the vignette shows “headline” and core Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) inflation numbers.
gesis V0.1: Provides an interface to the GESIS Catalogue of more than 5,000 data sets maintained by the Leibniz-Institute of the Social Sciences. The vignette shows …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com