The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is a warehouse of species occurrence data - collecting data from a lot of different sources. Our package rgbif allows you to interact with GBIF from R. We interact with GBIF via their Application Programming Interface, or API. Our last version on CRAN (v0.3) ... [Read more...]

We are building a taxonomic toolbelt for R called taxize - which gives you programmatic access to many sources of taxonomic data on the web. We just pushed a new version to CRAN (v0.1.5) with a lot of changes (see here for a rundown). Here are a few highlights of ... [Read more...]

We have previously written about creating interactive maps on the web from R, with the interactive maps on Github. See here, here, here, and here. A different approach is to use CartoDB, a freemium service with sql interface to your data tables that provides a map to visualize data in ... [Read more...]

Previously on this blog we have discussed making geojson maps and uploading to Github for interactive visualization with USGS BISON data, and with GBIF data, and on my own personal blog. This is done using a file format called geojson, a file format based on JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) in ... [Read more...]

Open access week is here! We love open access, and think it's extremely important to publish in open access journals. One of the many benefits of open access literature is that we likely can use the text of articles in OA journals for many things, including text-mining. What's even more ... [Read more...]