R and the Data Science Toolkit

I recently decided to present a talk to the Denver R Users Group (DRUG) on how to make an R package (May 17). There were only two problems: (1) I’ve never made a package and (2) I had nothing in mind to package up.  At about this same time, Pete Warden and others were blogging about the iPhone tracking issue [1]. How are these two events related? Well, I remembered that a few of my favorite Twitter ‘friends’ posted some things related to Pete Warden’s “The Data Science Toolkit (DSTK)” [2] a while back. And? And at the time I thought that it would be cool to have an R package/wrapper for accessing the DSTK’s API, similar to Drew Conway’s  R wrapper  for the infochimps API.

So I’m happy to announce that after spending a little time on this project in the past week, Version 0.1 of the RDSTK package is available on github. I haven’t submitted this package to CRAN and, hence, you need to install it from source (RDSTK_0.1.tar.gz). In order to do this, use the install.packages() function within R or R CMD INSTALL from the shell prompt. Note that the package depends on the RCurl, plyr, and rjson packages.

The following functions are included in the package:

• street2coordinates
• ip2coordinates
• coordinates2politics
• text2sentences
• text2people
• html2text
• text2times

They should be easy to use if you are familiar to the DSTK API. If not, RTFM!

Let me know if you have any comments and/or suggestions. Happy hacking.

Acknowledgements:

I wanted to mention that I received a bit of help with the RCurl package from “Noah” on stackoverflow, Andy Gayton on stackoverflow, and Duncan Temple Lang on the R-Help list.  Thanks!

Footnotes:

1. To borrow a joke from Asi Behar, “Right after word leaks that the iPhone has been tracking your location at all times, we find Osama. Coincidence? Thanks Apple!”
2. You may recall that a while back, I tweeted about disliking the phrase “data science”.  My feelings have not changed.