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ropensci / bowerbird

Keep a collection of sparkly data resources
https://docs.ropensci.org/bowerbird
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data retriever and bowerbird #13

Open dmcglinn opened 6 years ago

dmcglinn commented 6 years ago

I just learned about this cool package! It looks very nice. I just wanted to drop a line to let you guys know about @weecology's project called the data retriever and the corresponding R package rdataretriever. It seems like there could be some room for some future complementary development of these data acquisition tools. Anyways just wanted to say hi and keep up the good work.

raymondben commented 6 years ago

Hi @dmcglinn - thanks for the note. Yes, we know about rdataretriever, and had similarly thought that there might be some complementary crossover somewhere ... but haven't thought any more deeply than that! Assuming I understand rdataretriever correctly, it's more or less a wrapper to the python code where all the magic happens. So I'm not sure that bowerbird (being largely an R wrapper to wget) offers a lot of opportunities for standing on each other's shoulders, but maybe I just haven't thought about it enough! There may be scope to share data source definitions between the packages, but (a) I (again) haven't looked in detail - from a quick scan it looks like we could use some of yours but not others, and (b) I'm not sure that bowerbird data source definitions would be overly helpful to you, because bowerbird doesn't enumerate all the individual resources (we rely on wget to recursively find them) nor does it do any reformatting of the data once downloaded, as you do. If you have any ideas, happy to chat ...