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Programmatic access to biodiversity data is revolutionising large-scale, reproducible biodiversity research. In the marine realm, the largest global database of species occurrence records is the Ocean Biogeographic Information System, OBIS. As of January 2017, OBIS contains 47.78 million occurrences of 117,345 species, all openly available and accessible via the OBIS API. The number of questions to address using these kinds of resources is as large as the number of investigators, but certain operations commonly crop up in many workflows....
This week an update for xml2 and a new xslt package have appeared on CRAN. A full announcement for xml2 version 1.1 will appear on the rstudio blog. This post explains xml validation (via xsd schema) and xml transformation (via xslt stylesheets) which have been added in this release. XML schemas and stylesheets are not exactly new; both xslt 1.1 (2001) and xsd 1.0 (2004) have been available in browsers for over a decade....
A research project often starts with a bright idea and an initial commitment of volunteer time, or perhaps, a fixed term grant. But what happens after that initial activity? How can the project continue to sustain itself? (We define sustainability as the capacity to endure. Software is sustainable if it will continue to be available in the future, on new platforms, and meeting new needs. [This is from slide 23 of http://www....
Making packages is a great way to organize R code, whether it’s a set of scripts for personal use, a set of functions for internal company use or a lab group, or to distribute your new cool framework foobar to the masses. There’s a number of guides to writing packages, including http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/. As you develop packages there’s a number of issues that don’t often get much air time. I’ll cover some of them here....
A new version of jsonlite package to CRAN. This is a maintenance release with enhancements and bug fixes. A summary of changes in v1.2 from the NEWS file: Add read_json and write_json convenience wrappers, #161 Update modp_numtoa from upstream, fixes a rounding issue in #148. Ensure asJSON.POSIXt does not use sci notation for negative values, #155 Tweak num_to_char to properly print large negative numbers Performance optimization for simplyfing data frames (see below) Use the Github compare page to see the full diff on metacran....
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