metadata

metadata is an R package with functions for adding and retrieving metadata to and from datasets.

Installing

metadata is not available on [CRAN] (https://cran.r-project.org/). In order to use it you must install from this GitHub repository. The most simple method is by using devtools. First install and load devtools:

install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)

Once devtools has been loaded, metadata can be installed and loaded with:

install_github("ofurkusi/metadata")
library(metadata)

Using metadata

Load or create your dataset, in this case a sample df data.frame is created and some metadata added.

> df <- data.frame(l = c(1, 2, 3), r = c(4, 5, 6))
> metadata(df) <- list(Title = "My numbers", Source = "Hand input")

You can retrieve and print the metadata by calling

> metadata(df)
Title:   My numbers
Source:  Hand input

Or access individual metadata elements, e.g.

metadata(df)$Title
[1] "My numbers"

You can use any keywords you like as long as you provide a valid list object.

The metadata is stored as an attribute to your data.frame and can be accessed manually like any other attribute

> attributes(df)
$names
[1] "l" "r"

$row.names
[1] 1 2 3

$class
[1] "data.frame"

$metadata
$metadata$Title
[1] "My numbers"

$metadata$Source
[1] "Hand input"

Reading attributes from a file

You can store your attributes in a separate file alongside your dataset and load it at the same time you load your data. As an example, take the following [YAML] (http://yaml.org/) stored in the file metadata.yml:

---
Title:    Number of starships by stardates
Source:   United Federation of Planets
Updated:  -306869.6025602105

When loading the dataset

library(yaml)

starships <- read.csv("starships.csv")
metadata(starships) <- yaml.load_file("metadata.yml")

Describing data

While metadata does not suggest or require any particular format of the metadata, there do exist some prominent vocabularies for describing data. For examples see:

• The Schema.org schema for a Dataset
• The JSON-stat StatisticalTable schema
• The Statistical Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX) Technical Specification
• The PX file format specification (PC-Axis)
• Google's Dataset Publishing Language (DSPL)

License

This package is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3, as published by the Free Software Foundation.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

A copy of the GNU General Public License, version 3, is available at http://www.r-project.org/Licenses/GPL-3