Living in London, travelling using public transport is often the best way to get around. Before setting out on a journey one checks the status of the network. Doing so today I came across this page: our open data from Transport for London.  I learnt that by making TFL travel data openly available, some 11,000 developers (sic!) have registered for access, out of which some 600 travel apps have emerged.

A new package crul ison CRAN. crul is another HTTP client for R, but is relatively simplifiedcompared to httr, and is being builtto link closely with webmockr and vcr. webmockr andvcr are packages ported from Ruby’s webmockand vcr, respectively.They both make mocking HTTP requests really easy. A major use case for mocking HTTP requests is for unit tests.

Geospatial data input/output, manipulation, and vizualization are tasks that are common to many disciplines. Thus, we’re keenly interested in making great tools in this space. We have an increasing set of spatial tools, each of which we’ll cover sparingly. See the cran and github badges for more information.

[ “Education doesn’t make you happy. And what is freedom? We don’t become happy just because we are free, if we are. Or because we have been educated, if we have. But because education may be the means by which we realize we are happy. It opens our eyes, our ears. Tells use where delights are lurking. Convinces us that there is only one freedom of any importance whatsoever: that of the mind.

Last August, I wrote about data galore , the archival of data for 133,885 (134 kilo) molecules into a repository, together with an associated data descriptor[cite]10.1038/sdata.2014.22[/cite] published in the new journal Scientific Data . Since six months is a long time in the rapidly evolving field of RDM, or research data management, I offer an update in the form of some new observations.

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.

We just released v0.2 of rnoaa. For details on the update, see the release notes. What follows are some notes on the more important changes.

We just released v0.3 of taxize. For details on the update, see the release notes. Some new features New function iplant_resolve() to do name resolution using the iPlant name resolution service. Note, this is different from http://taxosaurus.org/ that is wrapped in the tnrs() function. New function ipni_search() to search for names in the International Plant Names Index (IPNI). See below for more.

My name is displayed pretty prominently on this blog, but it is not always easy to find out who the real person is behind many a blog. In science, I am troubled by such anonymity.

One of the goals of the rOpenSci is to facilitate interoperability between different data sources around web with our tools. We can achieve this by providing functionality within our packages that converts data coming down via web APIs in one format (often a provider specific schema) into a standard format. The new version of rWBclimate that we just posted to CRAN does just that.