STATcubeR

R Interface for the 'STATcube' REST API and Open Government Data


Keywords
api, database, ogd, open-data, r, sdmx
Licenses
CNRI-Python-GPL-Compatible/CNRI-Python-GPL-Compatible

Documentation

STATcubeR

R-CMD-check GitHub code size in bytes GitHub last commit Lifecycle: experimental

R client for all things STATcube. Get data from the STATcube REST API or via the open government data portal at https://data.statistik.gv.at. {STATcubeR} makes it easy to include both those datasources into your R projects.

Installation

This package can be installed directly from github using the {remotes} package.

remotes::install_github("statistikat/STATcubeR")
Alternative: Install from tar.gz archives

If you are not able to use install_github() to install STATcubeR, you can also download the package as a tar archive from https://github.com/statistikat/STATcubeR/tags. The package can then be installed by providing a path to the downloaded archive file.

install.packages('STATcubeR-0.4.3.tar.gz', repos = NULL)

Open Data

To import datasets from https://data.statistik.gv.at, pass the dataset id to the od_table() function. For example, OGD data about the austrian population in 2020 can be accessed as follows.

library(STATcubeR)
population <- od_table("OGD_bevstandjbab2002_BevStand_2020")
population$tabulate()
# A STATcubeR tibble: 392,508 x 5
  `Time section` Sex   `Commune (aggregation by polit… `Age in single ye… Number
* <date>         <fct> <fct>                           <fct>               <int>
1 2020-01-01     male  Eisenstadt <10101>              under 1 year old       77
2 2020-01-01     male  Eisenstadt <10101>              1 year old             75
3 2020-01-01     male  Eisenstadt <10101>              2 years old            70
4 2020-01-01     male  Eisenstadt <10101>              3 years old            83
# … with 392,504 more rows

The resulting object contains labeled data (see above), raw data, metadata and more. See the OGD article for further details. The available datasets article provides an overview of the 315 datasets that are compatible with od_table().

STATcube API

In order to use the REST API, it is required to set up an API key. As mentioned in the api key article, this requres a STATcube subscription.

There are four main functions that interact with the API

  • sc_schema_catalogue() lists all available datasets and tables
  • sc_schema_db() provides metadata about a specific database
  • sc_table() requests a table from the API according to a json standard
  • sc_table_saved() requests a table based on an id

More information about the first two functions can be found in the schema article. sc_table() and sc_table_saved() have their own articles here and here.

Consistent data formats

Both OGD data and tables form the REST API are wrapped into an {R6} class to provide easy access to data and metadata. For example, the $tabulate() method is also available for tables from the REST API.

# https://statcube.at/statcube/openinfopage?id=debevstandjbab2002
population <- sc_table_saved("defaulttable_debevstandjbab2002")
population$tabulate()
# A STATcubeR tibble: 10 x 3
  `Time section` `Commune (aggregation by political district)`  Number
  <date>         <fct>                                           <dbl>
1 2021-01-01     Burgenland <AT11>                              296010
2 2021-01-01     Carinthia <AT21>                               562089
3 2021-01-01     Lower Austria <AT12>                          1690879
4 2021-01-01     Upper Austria <AT31>                          1495608
# … with 6 more rows

See the base class article for more information about the features of this class.