Nov 7, 2016

Software

New packages

• A new package isdparser (v0.1) is on CRAN. isdparser provides tools for parsing NOAA Integrated Surface Data (ISD) files, described at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/isd. Data includes for example, wind speed and direction, temperature, cloud data, sea level pressure, and more. ISD data comes from ~35,000 stations worldwide, though best coverage is in North America/Europe/Australia. Included are tools for parsing entire files, or individual lines of data. Check out the intro vignette to get started. Repository on GitHub
• A new package tesseract (v1.0) is on CRAN. tesseract provides bindings to the Tesseract OCR engine, with unicode (UTF-8) support that can recognize over 100 languages out of the box. Check out the README to get started. Repository on GitHub

Releases

• A new version (0.3.0) of lawn is on CRAN. See release notes for changes. This version is a big change from the previous version. We’ve updated the package to use turf.js v3.5.2, which means some functions are now defunct, there’s new functions, and parameters have changed in some functions. Breaking changes are never good, but we’re simply trying to mirror the turf.js API - hopefully they won’t make drastic changes too often. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.1.5) of stplanr is on CRAN. See release notes for changes. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (1.0.4) of rentrez is on CRAN. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.2.0) of geojsonlint is on CRAN. See release notes for changes, only major change is upgrading to js library geojsonhint v2.0.0-beta2. Repository on GitHub.
• A new version (0.3.0) of mapr is on CRAN. See release notes for changes. This version by default colors points separately by taxon, adds convex hull support for most plotting methods, and adds metadata to leaflet popups by default. Repository on GitHub.

Package notes

• rnoaa has its first reverse dependency: countyweather

Onboarding

We accept community contributed packages via our onboarding system - a software review system, sorta like scholarly paper review, but way better. We’ll highlight new packages here that have come through this system. A huge thanks to our reviewers, who do a lot of work reviewing (see the blog post on our review system), and the authors of the packages!

The following package recently went through our onboarding process and has been approved:

• camsRad > Client for CAMS Radiation Service
  • Author: Lukas Lundström
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#72
  • Reviewers:
    • Jeff Hollister

The following packages were recently submitted to our onboarding process and are undergoing review:

• EML > Read and Write Ecological Metadata Language Files
  • Author: Carl Boettiger
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#80
  • Reviewers:
    • Gabe Becker
    • Corinna Gries
• ccafs > Client for CCAFS GCM Data
  • Author: Scott Chamberlain
  • Issue: ropensci/onboarding#82
  • Reviewers (not assigned yet)

Use cases

Many recent papers and blog posts cite rOpenSci packages:

• Ladam et al. cite the gender package in their paper Does the Election of a Female Governor Influence Women’s Political Ambition? ¹
• Silge & Robinson cite and show examples of using gutenbergr in their book Tidy Text Mining with R ²
• Nishida shows examples of using our package riem to work with climate data in his post riem Package — Getting World Weather Data in Super Easy Way ³
• Maëlle Salmon shows how to use ropenaq in her post Personalizing the Data Points: Following the Open Data Trail to Coyhaique ⁴
• Christa Hasenkopf, co-founder of OpenAQ shows how to use ropenaq (maintained by Maëlle Salmon) in her post Open Air Quality Fun with Fireworks ⁵
• Maëlle Salmon shows how to use monkeylearn in her post Analyzing #first7jobs tweets with MonkeyLearn and R ⁶
• Mihaljević-Brandt et al. cite gender in their paper The Effect of Gender in the Publication Patterns in Mathematics ⁷
• Halse-Gramkow et al. cite taxize in their paper Using evolutionary tools to search for novel psychoactive plants ⁸
• Doyle et al. cite plotly in their paper A simple automated system for appetitive conditioning of zebrafish in their home tanks ⁹
• Hertler et al. cite plotly in their paper Temporal course of gene expression during motor memory formation in primary motor cortex of rats ¹⁰
• Meyer cites plotly in her paper Analysis of infection biomarkers within a Bayesian framework reveals their role in pneumococcal pneumonia diagnosis in HIV patients ¹¹
• Cole et al. cite pdftools in their paper Semi-Automated Identification of Ontological Labels in the Biomedical Literature with goldi ¹²
• Kyle Walker et al. cite plotly in his paper Tools for Interactive Visualization of Global Demographic Concepts in R ¹³
• Silva & Meireles cite RSelenium in their paper Ciência Política na era do Big Data: automação na coleta de dados digitais ¹⁴
• Dennis cites rplos in his book chapter Using R and ggvis to Create Interactive Graphics for Exploratory Data Analysis ¹⁵

Keep up with rOpenSci news

There are a number of ways to keep up with what rOpenSci is doing:

• Mailing list: Sign up with an email address to get new blog posts sent to your inbox -> ropensci.org/#subscribe
• rOpenSci on Twitter: we’re @ropensci
• The rOpenSci blog at ropensci.org/blog - you can subscribe in any RSS aggregator, or manually via https://ropensci.org/feed.xml. We also announce new blog posts on our Twitter account.

Footnotes