All posts (Page 121 of 122)
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We’ve been busy
We have been busy hacking away at code and our website. Here is an update on what we’ve been up to.
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Packages
rplos/alm PLoS provides two different API services: the Search API and ALM API. As their names suggest, the search API lets you search and get text from their papers and associated metadata. The ALM API allows you to get article level metrics data on PLoS papers. Up until a few weeks ago, both APIs were accessible via functions inside the rplos package, but they really served two different purposes. Thus, we decided to make two packages: rplos, which wraps just the Search API, and alm, which wraps just the ALM API. It especially made sense to break off the ALM API into its own package as other publishers can use the ALM API for delivering their own article level metrics given that the PLoS ALM code is open source. Thus, down the road, you should be able to get altmetrics from XYZ publisher using the alm package just by changing the base URL (a.k.a. the API endpoint).
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A guest blog post by Steve Moss
Why Python? A little background!
I started using Python in the summer of 2010. I had applied for the Master of Research postgraduate degree in Computational Biology at the University of York. They teach the programming portion of their course using Python. I thought it might be useful to learn it, before starting, to give me a bit of a head start.
...This is a guest post by Class-Thido Pfaff
We here present the BEFdata R package as part of the rOpenSci project. It is an API package that combines the strengths of the BEFdata portal in handling small, complex datasets with the powerful statics package R. The portal itself is free software as well and can be found here.
The BEFdata platforms support interdisciplinary data sharing and harmonisation of distributed research projects collaborating with each other. They upload, validate and store data from a formatted Excel workbook. Metadata can be downloaded in Ecological Metadata Language (EML) format. BEFdata allows the harmonization of naming conventions by generating category lists from the primary data, which can be reviewed and managed via the Excel workbook or directly on the platform. BEFdata provides a secure environment during on-going analysis; project members can only access primary data from other researchers after the acceptance of a data request The combination allows for efficient storage, description and access of research data. The package leverages the access to datasets as well as to workflows in form of R scripts stored on the portal for provenance tracking of computed results.
...Many US federal agencies are now running app competitions to highlight their web services (see here), and hopefully get people to build cool stuff using government data (see Data.gov for more). See here for a nice list of the US government’s web services.
One of these agencies was the United States Geological Survey (USGS). They opened up an app competition and [we won best overall app! Check out our app called TaxaViewer here: http://glimmer.rstudio.com/ropensci/usgs_app/. We were directed to use one or more of their web services, including mashing up with other web services. Of the USGS web services, we only used ITIS, but included 4 web services from other providers.
...Real use cases from people using our software are awesome. They are important for many reasons: 1) They make the code more useable because we may change code to make the interace and output easier to understand; 2) They may highlight bugs in our code; and 3) They show us what functions users care the most about (if we can assume number of questions equates to use).
If someone has a question, others are likely to have the same, or a similar question. Thus, we are sharing use cases on our blog.
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