Publications by rOpenSci Blog - R
Announcing our ambassadors program
In the last 12 months we traveled all over the world delivering talks and hands on workshops at various conferences and universities. This was a great opportunity for us to raise awareness for the project and get more of you involved as contributors and collaborators. As we scale the project to the next level, we need your help in spreading the m...
1986 sym
rOpenSci at NESCent Open Tree of Life Hackathon
The Open Tree of Life project aims to synthesize our combined knowledge of how organisms relate to each other, and make the results available to anyone who wants to use them. At present, the project contains data from more than 4,000 published phylogenies, which combine with other data sources to make a tree that covers 2.5 million species. In ...
1902 sym
NCEAS Codefest Follow-up
The week after labor day, we had the pleasure of attending the NCEAS open science codefest event in Santa Barbara. It was great to meet folks like the new arrivals at the expanding Mozilla Science Lab, Bill Mills and Abby Cabunoc (Bill even already has a great post up about the codefest), and see old friends from NCEAS and DataONE, among many mor...
2817 sym
New fiscal sponsorship agreement with NumFocus foundation
I’m very pleased to announce that rOpenSci has signed a comprehensive fiscal sponsorship agreement with the NumFocus foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit that supports R&D for open source scientific software projects. We are delighted to be in the company of esteemed projects such as IPython and Julia that share our goal of promoting reproducible re...
2467 sym 2 img
Growth of open data in biology
Why open data growth At rOpenSci we try to make it easier for people to use open data and contribute open data to the community. The question often arises: How much open data do we have? Another angle on this topic is: How much is open data growing? We provide access to dozens of data respositories through our various packages. We asked many of t...
6365 sym R (2934 sym/15 pcs) 28 img 1 tbl
Curling – exploring web request options
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 st...
7628 sym R (6256 sym/29 pcs)
Introducing a Wishlist for Scientific R Packages
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 featur...
2941 sym
Database interfaces
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 row...
11114 sym R (7697 sym/29 pcs) 4 img
The challenge of combining 176 x #otherpeoplesdata to create the Biomass And Allometry Database
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 challeng...
13964 sym R (852 sym/3 pcs) 6 img
A drat repository for rOpenSci
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(),...
6452 sym R (326 sym/3 pcs)