Web technologies are increasingly relevant to scientists working with data, for both accessing data and creating rich dynamic and interactive displays.  The XML and JSON data formats are widely used in Web services, regular Web pages and JavaScript code, and visualization formats such as SVG and KML for Google Earth and Google Maps.  In addition, scientists use HTTP and other network protocols to scrape data from Web pages, access REST and SOAP Web Services, and interact with NoSQL databases and text search applications.  This book provides a practical hands-on introduction to these technologies, including high-level functions the authors have developed for data scientists.  It describes strategies and approaches for extracting data from HTML, XML, and JSON formats and how to programmatically access data from the Web.

Along with these general skills, the authors illustrate several applications that are relevant to data scientists, such as reading and writing spreadsheet documents both locally and via Google Docs, creating interactive and dynamic visualizations, displaying spatial-temporal displays with Google Earth, and generating code from descriptions of data structures to read and write data.  These topics demonstrate the rich possibilities and opportunities to do new things with these modern technologies.  The book contains many examples and case-studies that readers can use directly and adapt to their own work.  The authors have focused on the integration of these technologies with the R statistical computing environment.  However, the ideas and skills presented here are more general, and statisticians who use other computing environments will also find them relevant to their work.

Deborah Nolan is Professor of Statistics at University of California, Berkeley.

Duncan Temple Lang is Associate Professor of Statistics at University of California, Davis and has been a member of both the S and R development teams.

HTML
JSON document
R
XML
data science
data visualization with R

• Front Matter
• Data Formats: XML and JSON
  Front Matter
• Data Formats: XML and JSON
  Getting Started with XML and JSON
• Parsing XML Content
• XPath, XPointer, and XInclude
• Strategies for Extracting Data from HTML and XML Content
• Generating XML
• JavaScript Object Notation
• Data Formats: XML and JSON
  An Introduction to XML
• Web Technologies Getting Data from the Web
  Front Matter
• HTTP Requests
• Scraping Data from HTML Forms
• REST-based Web Services
• SimpleWeb Services and Remote Method Calls with XML-RPC
• Accessing SOAP Web Services
• Authentication for Web Services via OAuth
• General XML Application Areas
  Front Matter
• Meta-Programming with XML Schema
• Spreadsheets
• Scalable Vector Graphics
• General XML Application Areas
  Keyhole Markup Language
• New Ways to Think about Documents
• Back Matter

University of California, Berkeley, USA
Deborah Nolan

University of California, Davis, USA
Duncan Temple Lang

Book Title
XML and Web Technologies for Data Sciences with R

Authors
Deborah Nolan, Duncan Temple Lang

Series Title
Use R!

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7900-0

Softcover ISBN
978-1-4614-7899-7
Published: 29 November 2013

eBook ISBN
978-1-4614-7900-0
Published: 29 November 2013

Series ISSN
2197-5736

Series E-ISSN
2197-5744

Edition Number
1

Number of Pages
XXIV, 663

Number of Illustrations
14 b/w illustrations, 51 illustrations in colour

Topics
Statistics and Computing/Statistics Programs, Programming Languages, Compilers, Interpreters, Statistics, general