Solved – Data APIs/feeds available as packages in R

datasetrreferences

EDIT: The Web Technologies and Services CRAN task view contains a much more comprehensive list of data sources and APIs available in R. You can submit a pull request on github if you wish to add a package to the task view.

I'm making a list of the various data feeds that are already hooked into R or that are easy to setup. Here's my initial list of packages, and I was wondering what else I'm missing.

I'm trying to limit this list to "real time" or "close to real time" data feeds/APIs, where the underlying data might change between downloads. There's plenty of lists out there for static datasets, which only require one download.

This list is currently biased towards financial/time series data, and I could use some help expanding it into other domains.

Free Data:
Data Source – Package
Google Finance historical data – quantmod
Google Finance balance sheets – quantmod
Yahoo Finance historical data – quantmod
Yahoo Finance historical data – tseries
Yahoo Finance current options chain – quantmod
Yahoo Finance historical analyst estimates – fImport
Yahoo Finance current key stats – fImport – seems to be broken
OANDA historic exchange rates/metal prices – quantmod
FRED historic macroeconomic indicators – quantmod
World Bank historic macroeconomic indicators – WDI
Google Trends historic search volume data – RGoogleTrends
Google Docs – RGoogleDocs
Google Storage – RGoogleStorage
Twitter – twitteR
Zillow – Zillow
New York Times – RNYTimes
US Census 2000 – UScensus2000
infochimps – infochimps
datamarket – rdatamarket – requires free account
Factual.com – factualR
Geocode addresses – RDSTK
Map coordinates to political boundaries – RDSTK
Weather Underground – Roll your own
Google News – Roll your own
Earth Sciences netCDF Data – Roll your own
Climate Data – Roll your own
Public health data – Roll your own
OAI Harvester – Open Archives Initiative harvester
RAmazonS3 – S3 Amazon storage server
Rflikr – Flikr api

Requires a subscription:
Bloomberg – RBloomberg
LIM – LIM
Trades and Quotes from NYSE – RTAQ
Interactive Brokers – IBrokers

Best Answer

  1. Instructions for using R to download netCDF data can be found here, a common format used for storing Earth science data, e.g. as in marine geospatial data from OpenEarth or climate model driver and forecasts from UCAR

  2. rnpn (under development) enables you to get data from the National Phenology Network - a citizen science project to track the timing of plant green-up, flowering, and senescence. See the developer's blog post.

  3. -obsolete- RClimate provides tools to download and manipulate flat-file climate data (with tutorials, including here-

  4. Download historical finance data with tseries::get.hist.quote

  5. Michael Samuel's documents downloading public health data

  6. raster::getData provides access to climate variables via worldclim

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