HDDTOOLS: an R package serving Hydrological Data Discovery Tools

Abstract:

Many governmental bodies and institutions are currently committed to publish open data as the result of a trend of increasing transparency, based on which a wide variety of information produced at public expense is now becoming open and freely available to improve public involvement in the process of decision and policy making.

Discovery, access and retrieval of information is, however, not always a simple task. Especially when programmatic access to data resources is not allowed, downloading metadata catalogue, select the information needed, request datasets, de-compression, conversion, manual filtering and parsing can become rather tedious.

The R package “hddtools” is an open source project, designed to make all the above operations more efficient by means of re-usable functions.

The package facilitate non programmatic access to various online data sources such as the Global Runoff Data Centre, NASA's TRMM mission, the Data60UK database amongst others.

This package complements R’s growing functionality in environmental web technologies to bridge the gap between data providers and data consumers and it is designed to be the starting building block of scientific workflows for linking data and models in a seamless fashion.