Updated infochimps R package, includes several new APIs

March 21, 2011

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

Recently, the good folks at Infochimps.com rolled out a series of new APIs to add to their already impressive set of data resources.

I have been in a perpetual state of catch-up since the new year, so I have only now got around to adding some of these new APIs to the infochimps R package. Here are the new APIs:

ufo: 60,000+ Documented UFO Sightings With Text Descriptions And Metadata
geo.names: Global Place Names Autocomplete: GeoNames
tw.PeopleSearch: Twitter people search. Full text search, on any or all fields, of twitter user profiles.
wikipedia.abstracts: Wikipedia Articles Abstract Search
tw.Autocomplete: Twitter Screen Name Autocomplete
yahoo.stocks: Yahoo! Stock Search
word.freq: Word Frequencies From the British National Corpus

You will notice that there are several APIs missing. Maintaining and updating this package is a basic budget constraint probem, wherein I have limited time to commit to adding stuff in a given week or month. As such, these were the APIs from the new set that seemed most valuable to me. That said, if there is a large consensus to add others I am happy to do so, just ping me in the comments. The rest of them will eventually make it in, but for now only these seven made the cut.

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