opendatawindsor is an R interface to the City of Windsor open data portal. A package called opendatatoronto is the main motivation for our package and works as an excellent guide as it is developed for a similar purpose which allows users to load the data available on the open data portal of City of Toronto into their R environments directly without downloading each and every file individually on their systems.
This package reduces the time required for data preparation by 50-60% and analysts can move on to the next stage of Analysis easily as compared to the conventional way of downloading individual files, combining them and then preparing the data.
The devtools package is necessary for installing our package.
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("JervisMurzello/opendatawindsor")
You can see a list of available datasets by using the command all_data. This will show metadata about the package, including the public affair the dataset belongs to, the description of the public affair, the attributes(columns) in the particular dataset, how often they are updated and the number of datasets per issue.
library(opendatawindsor)
all_data
Finally, you can download the resource (i.e., the actual data) directly into R using get_data() with the name of the dataset (mentioned in the first column of the metadata file) as the argument. If more than 1 dataset is required, the names need to be put inside a c() vector.
# Only 1 dataset is required
get_data("AlleyMaintenance_2017")
# More than 1 dataset is required
get_data(c("dataset name 1", "dataset name 2", ...))