My First R Package: infochimps

November 20, 2010

(This article was first published on Zero Intelligence Agents » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)

I have finally taken the plunge and created my first R package! As frequent readers will know, I often sing the praises of infochimps, a startup out of Austin, TX attempting to be the world’s data clearinghouse. While infochimps is an excellent resource for data sets, they also provide their own set excellent data APIs, which provide information about Twitter, U.S. Census data, and IP geo-location.

I use these APIs quite a bit, and after writing several functions to pull data from them I decided it was time to write a full-blown R wrapper to all of these APIs. For your enjoyment, I submit the infochimps R package, which provides R functions to download and parse data from all of the current infochimps APIs.

I submitted the package to CRAN this afternoon, but am still awaiting approval. In the meantime, if you would like to test out the package you are welcome to download and install it. This process is very straightforward, simply download the source code and run the following command at the R console:

> install.packages("infochimps_0.1.tar.gz", repos=NULL, type="source")

Happy data mining, and please let me know what breaks!

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