The R interface to the Textual Dataset File Format

tidyfr provides an interface to retrieve data stored in the Textual Dataset File Format (TDFF) from the Eurac Research Institute for Biomedicine. All data files from the CHRIS study are stored in this format, thus, tidyfr allows to import CHRIS data. The main properties of this interface/import functionality are:

• Retrieve data for a particular version of a data module.
• Return the data as data.frame with all variables in their correct data type.

Textual Dataset File Format

A documentation for the new data format can be found here. In brief, a data set is defined as a directory (or archive) containing 6 text files:

• info.txt: general data information.
• data.txt: the data.
• labels.txt: column definitions with labels.
• groups.txt: column groups, i.e. columns being related to each other.
• grp_labels.txt: group definition and labels.
• mappings.txt: category definitions and special values.

Definitions and how data is organized

CHRIS data is structured in the following hierarchical folder structure:

• CHRIS data path: base folder containing one or more of
  • CHRIS modules: a folder bundling all data for a certain module containing one or more:
  • Module version: a folder defining the version containing one:
    • CHRIS data: a folder containing data in the new CHRIS textual dataset format.

Data from the CHRIS questionnaire data for the CHRIS baseline release would thus be available in a folder /CHRIS/Interview-data/version_1.0/data.