A package for tidying nested lists

Blog
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Authors: Amanda Dobbyn, Jim Hester, Laura DeCicco, Christine Stawitz, Isabella Velasquez

This post describes a project from rOpenSci unconf18. In the spirit of exploration and experimentation at our unconferences, projects are not necessarily finished products or in scope for rOpenSci packages.

Data == knowledge! Much of the data we use, whether it be from government repositories, social media, GitHub, or e-commerce sites comes from public-facing APIs. The quantity of data available is truly staggering, but munging JSON output into a format that is easily analyzable in R is an equally staggering undertaking. When JSON is turned into an R object, it usually becomes a deeply nested list riddled with missing values that is difficult to untangle into a tidy format. Moreover, every API presents its own challenges; code you’ve written to clean up data from GitHub isn’t necessarily going to work on Twitter data, as each API spews data out in its own unique, headache-inducing nested list structure. To ease and generalize this process, Amanda Dobbyn proposed an unconf18 project for a general API response tidier! Welcome roomba, our first stab at easing the process of tidying nested lists!
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Read the full post here: https://ropensci.org/blog/2018/06/26/roomba/

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Could using a registered trademark as a name for an open source package cause problems down the line, e.g., being forced to change the name later?

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Definitely. The name would have to be changed if it goes beyond this. Projects at our 2-day unconferences are meant to be exploratory / experimental and often with a hint of fun. In some cases projects are developed further so the team would have to make a name change :grinning:

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Yes, I admit it’s a fun name.

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Apart from the package name, there might also be an issue with publishing raw Twitter data. As far as I understand the terms of use of the Twitter API (which I have not checked in the last year, though), API users do not have the right to redistribute the data.