RWebData: A High-Level Interface to the Programmable Web
Journal
arXiv preprint
Type
working paper
Date Issued
2016
Author(s)
Abstract (De)
The rise of the programmable web offers new opportunities for the empirically driven social sciences. The access, compilation and preparation of data from the programmable web for statistical analysis can, however, involve substantial up-front costs for the practical researcher. The R-package RWebData provides a high-level framework that allows data to be easily collected from the programmable web in a format that can directly be used for statistical analysis in R without bothering about the data's initial format and nesting structure. It was developed specially for users who have no experience with web technologies and merely use R as a statistical software. The core idea and methodological contribution of the package are the disentangling of parsing web data and mapping them with a generic algorithm (independent of the initial data structure) to a at table-like representation. This paper provides an overview of the high-level functions for R-users, explains the basic architecture of the package, and illustrates the implemented data mapping algorithm.
Language
English
HSG Classification
contribution to scientific community
HSG Profile Area
SEPS - Quantitative Economic Methods
Official URL
Division(s)
Contact Email Address
ulrich.matter@unisg.ch
Eprints ID
252060
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
open.access
Name
1603.00293.pdf
Size
534.85 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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