Mazama Science has released a new set of tutorials demonstrating the use of air quality R packages to investigate data from regulatory monitors and low-cost sensors. This post is just a short summary of what the tutorials cover. We invite anyone interested in wildfire smoke and air quality to run through the tutorials and provide feedback.
Continue readingTag: R
Cross-origin requests with beakr
beakr is a lightweight and flexible web framework that allows you to incorporate R code as the Middleware responsible for handling web requests. At Mazama Science, we developed beakr to simplify the process of creating R-based web services that we use to deliver a variety of products: data files, images, rendered Rmarkdown documents, etc.
In this article, we discuss using beakr to set a CORS header and create an example beakr instance that can respond to cross-origin javascript requests.
Continue readingMazamaSpatialUtils R package
Version 0.7 of the MazamaSpatialUtils is now available on CRAN and includes an expanded suite of spatial datasets with even greater cleanup and harmonization than in previous versions. If your work involves environmental monitoring of any kind, this package may be of use. Here is the description:
A suite of conversion functions to create internally standardized spatial polygons dataframes. Utility functions use these data sets to return values such as country, state, timezone, watershed, etc. associated with a set of longitude/latitude pairs. (They also make cool maps.)
In this post we discuss the reasons for creating this package and describe its main features.
Continue readingWeb 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.
Continue readingWhen 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.
Continue readingbeakr – A small web framework for R
What is beakr?
beakr is an unopinionated and minimalist web framework for developing and deploying web services with R. It is designed to make it as simple as possible for data scientists and engineerings to quickly write web applications, services, and APIs without worrying about lower-level details or high-level side-effects. In other words, beakr is made to be explicit, robust, and scalable – and the batteries are not included.
Continue readingStandard Latitudes and Longitudes
What? Where? When?
These are key questions that every scientist or other collector of environmental data must answer.
- What is the value of the thing we are measuring?
- Where are we taking the measurement?
- When are we taking the measurement?
In a previous post we discussed how to standardize “when”. But what about “where”?
Continue readingEasier Error Handling in R with try()
In a previous post, we looked at error handling in R with the tryCatch() function and how this could be used to write Java style try-catch-finally blocks. This time we’ll look at what can be done with the try() function and how we can easily process warning and error messages to take appropriate action when something goes wrong.
Basic Error Handing in R with tryCatch()
The R language definition section on Exception Handling describes a very few basics about exceptions in R but is of little use to anyone trying to write robust code that can recover gracefully in the face of errors. In fact, if you do a little searching you will find that quite a few people have read through the ?tryCatch documentation but come away just as confused as when they started. In this post we’ll try to clarify a few things and describe how R’s error handling functions can be used to write code that functions similarly to Java’s try-catch-finally construct.