Sharing modules and data

Alex M Chubaty & Eliot McIntire

December 9, 2016

Source: vignettes/Sharing-Modules.Rmd

SpaDES module repositories

A ‘module repository’ is simply a web site that serves files using a particular directory structure (the same directory structure used in a local SpaDES module repo).

Our module repo is at https://github.com/PredictiveEcology/SpaDES-modules

This is the default repo in SpaDES.

- it's public
- it's easily accessible using `downloadModule()`
getOption('spades.modulesRepo') ## default url prefix is GitHub
## NULL

Other SpaDES module repositories

Anybody can create their own repository as well (R has CRAN, Rforge, BioConductor and many lesser used ones)

downloadModule() has a repo argument.

Our SpaDES module repository

  • Initially, most SpaDES modules will not be there
  • e.g., SpaDES-LBM (SpaDES – Landis Biomass Succession) is not there yet (we would like to publish it first)

What is GitHub?

Github.com is a free* code archive and hosting service.

Allows hosting of public and private code repositories, build around git version control software.

GitHub provides:

  • code archiving/distribution
  • version control
  • publication (code, html pages, and others)
  • collaboration
  • bug tracker
  • user friendly web interface and desktop client

Using GitHub for collaboration

We, and many others, use GitHub extensively for all our group’s work

  • Like Dropbox, in the sense that there is a cloud version, and potentially many local copies all over the place
  • Unlike Dropbox, the copies on people’s computers are not automatically there
  • Requires manual intervention

GitHub Client

  • For your local copy of the files, you need an extra piece of software on your computer (like the “Dropbox client”)

  • git and GitHub both require a bit of learning:

  • There are many other great git clients:

shiny apps

  • Massively powerful
  • Allows the process of data wrangling, data visualization, data analysis, etc. to be made into interactive web (and mobile) apps
  • By moving the web app development into R (instead of taking R outputs and putting them into a web development kit), means that the analysis power can be at the interactive stage
  • Also, data analysts can be making web pages

shine function

SpaDES has a simple function that takes any simList and makes a web app from it:

?shine
Try it!

Simple shiny apps

Themes

  • Lots of developers making shiny themes
  • Often they are wrappers on javascript code
  • So your look can be easily modified without many web development skills

Shiny maps with leaflet

Data sources

Data sharing

  • We have shown a way to specify default data sources

Where was that?

  • We have shown a way to specify default data manipulations and data preparations of those default data

Where was that?

If there are complex data sets?

  • And from many sources?
  • Can still use sourceURL in defineModule and create an .inputObjects function which will do all the manipulations

How to adequately describe data?

  • It is clear that there is not enough information contained in the metadata to fully describe everything about the required dataset(s) type(s)
  • Use the .Rmd file to describe more for human eyes
  • It is very difficult to algorithmically define data in a generic way
  • There are standards, but SpaDES doesn’t tap into those (yet!)

Overriding default datasets

  • If a user passes an object that a module requires (in ‘defineModule’ metadata)

  • The default data will not be used

  • checksums
  • externally hosted data

  • include data with your module code