[R] How to search for packages

[Monica Pisica]

Hadley,


Your site is interesting .... the little example with the graphics is actually what i was thinking about. Now I've tagged 2 packages as "robust analysis" but if i press the Tags button i see only my tags - i don't see the graphics tags anymore. I would be extremely happy if you get enough motivation to continue this effort.

Also it is staggering that there are over 1200 packages for R .... i was suspecting close to 1000  .....

About reviewing packages - i am not sure i am versed enough for that but at least it might be of interest that some packages do not like to be loaded together for some of their functions to work properly. The example i know of is "robust" and "mvoutlier". I like both packages and i use them quite often .... but now i know when i can have both loaded together and when i have to detach one or another. On the other hand i've published some scientific articles in which i've used R and different packages. It might be of interest to have a place to cite these articles, even if their main focuss is not R itself, but R was used to perform the analysis.

Thanks,

Monica


> Date: Mon, 4 Feb 2008 10:03:38 -0600
> From: h.wickham at gmail.com
> To: pisicandru at hotmail.com
> Subject: Re: [R] How to search for packages
> CC: r-help at r-project.org
>
> On Feb 4, 2008 8:34 AM, Monica Pisica  wrote:
>>
>> Hi everybody,
>>
>>
>> I know this might be very off topic and it took me quite a while to up my courage to post this…. But I remember a thread some time ago about how we can find the packages we need to do specific tasks in R if we don't know before hand which ones actually do it. Now all the packages are listed alphabetically on the web site. Since I am not very advanced in writing my own functions I relay heavily on work already done and only when I have no other choice I modify existing functions. Usually my modifications are only cosmetic.
>>
>>
>> But sometimes I use lots of time to just read the descriptions of packages until I decide that maybe one will do close to what I want. I wonder if there is any way to improve how these packages are displayed on the site and help with this decision. I wonder if the community as a whole can come up with some broader categories such as Bayesian, spatial statistics, bootstrap, vegetation analysis, circular statistics, robust statistics, etc., and the authors of the package can choose 1 or 2 or how many categories they think their package fits the most. On the web page we can have a list of those very broad categories and within each category we can have in alpha order the packages themselves with their description and such as it is now. So if I am interested in vegetation analysis or environmental analysis but I never did it before I go to that category and see which packages are more geared towards that particular subject. For example it was by chance alone and some GOOGLE search that I discovered that the package labdsv has anything to do with vegetation analysis since first of course I looked at any package which might have "veg" or "env" in the title.
>
> Before Christmas I started working on a solution for this -
> http://crantastic.org - a site for searching, reviewing and tagging R
> packages. Unfortunately I've run out of steam lately (and the lack of
> a 64-bit ubuntu package for R means it's a bit out of date), but the
> basic ideas are there. If you like how the site is looking so far
> please let me know, as it will be motivation for me to get the site
> finished.
>
> Hadley
>
> --
> http://had.co.nz/

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