November 2020 – Working With Data

Data producers vs. data consumers

In the marketplace, the needs of producers and consumers are often at odds: producers want higher prices, consumers lower ones; producers want easy assembly, consumers easy dis-assembly; producers want flexibility and rapid prototyping, consumers reliability and long-term support.

The same competing needs exist in the world of scientific data management where producers of data and consumers of data often operate in very different worlds with very different sets of tools.

Web Frameworks for R – A Brief Overview

Having recently announced the beakr web framework for R, we have received several questions about context and why we choose beakr over other options for some of our web services. This post will attempt to answer some of those questions by providing a few opinions on beakr and other web frameworks for R.

The comparison will by no means be exhaustive but will attempt to briefly summarize some of the key features each web framework has to offer. While there are some differences in the approach each package takes to developing web services, they all share similar basic functionality. In the end, the choice of a particular framework will come down largely to personal preference.

When is a number not a number?

Have you ever asked yourself whether your telephone number is really a number? It’s got numbers in it but does it measure anything?

How about your credit card number? PO Box? Social Security Number? Zip code? What would happen if you subtracted one of these from another?

As it turns out, many of the “numbers” we deal with every day are actually identifiers and not a measure of something. Sadly, too many data managers do not distinguish between the two even though making this distinction is quite simple.