by Joseph Rickert

As forecast, the number of R packages hosted on CRAN exceeded 10,000 in January. Dirk Eddelbuettel, who tracks what’s happening on CRAN with his CRANberries site, called hurricaneexposure the 10,000th package in a tweet on January 27th.

hurricaneexposure was one of two hundred and six new packages that arrived on CRAN in January. Approximately 10% of these packages have to do with providing access to data in by some means or another. Some packages contain the data sets, some provide wrappers to APIs, and at least one package provides code to scrape data from a site. The following 17 packages are picks for data-related packages for January 2017. I will select packages in other categories in a follow-up post.

Data Packages

• elevatr v0.1.1: Provides access to several databases that provide elevation data, including Mapzen Elevation Service, Mapzen Terrain Service, Amazon Terrain Tiles, and the USGS Elevation Point Query Service. There is a vignette.

• epidata v0.1.0: Provides tools to retrieve data from the Economic Policy Institute. The README shows how to use the package.

• europop v0.3: Contains a data set giving the populations of all European cities with at least 10,000 inhabitants during the period 1500-1800.

• fivethirtyeight v0.1.0: Provides the data, code, and interactive visualizations behind FiveThirtyEight Stories. There is a vignette that provides an example of a data analysis, and a list of data sets that are included.

• getCRUCLdata v.1.1: Provides functions that automate downloading and importing climatology data from University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). There is a vignette to get you started.

• hurricaneexposure v0.0.1: Allows users to create time series of tropical storm exposure histories for chosen counties for a number of hazard metrics (wind, rain, distance from the storm, etc.). The vignette provides an overview.
  

• metScanR v0.0.1: Provides functions for mapping and gathering meteorological data from various US surface networks: COOP, USCRN, USRCRN, AL-USRCRN, ASOS, AWOS, SNOTEL, SNOTELLITE, SCAN, SNOW, and NEON.

• mglR v0.1.0: Provides tools to download and organize large-scale, publicly available genomic studies on a candidate gene scale. The vignette shows how to use the package.

• nzpullover v0.0.2: Contains data sets of driving offences and fines in New Zealand between 2009 and 2016, originally published by the New Zealand Police.

• owmr v0.7.2: Provides a wrapper for the OpenWeatherMap API.

• PeriodicTable v0.1.1: Contains a data set of the properties of chemical elements.

• pwt9 v9.0-0: Contains the Penn World Table 9, which provides information on relative levels of income, output, inputs, and productivity for 182 countries between 1950 and 2014.

• rdwd v0.7.0: Provides functions to obtain climate data from the German Weather Service, Deutscher Wetterdienst, (DWD). There is a vignette on Weather Stations and another showing how to use the package.

• rwars v1.0.0: Provides functions to retrieve and reformat data from the ‘Star Wars’ API SWAPI. The vignette shows how to use the package.

• wikidataQueryServiceR v0.1.0: Provides an API Client Library for Wikidata Query Service, which provides a way for tools to query Wikidata via SPARQL. See the README for how to use it.

• wikilake v0.1: Provides functions to scrape metadata about lakes from Wikipedia. The vignette fetches data from Michigan lakes.

• worrms v0.1.0: Provides a client for the World Register of Marine Species. The vignette shows how to use the package.