By XRONOS development team, 2021-08-16 01:00:00 UTC
To improve the use of data repositories, it is becoming increasingly important that the data is easily and quickly available to the appropriate analysis tools.
For this purpose, it is desirable that these repositories have a so-called API (application programming interface) that facilitates queries for software and automates them. At the same time, such repositories are also often better used if there are simple tools in evaluation environments that enable this data access.
From the beginning, XRONOS has had an API that reliably provides this data in a machine-readable and -analyzable form using well-known standards (JSON). Thanks to the work of our team member Joe Roe, there is now also an R package that provides easy access to the information held in XRONOS for the most widely used statistical environment in archaeology.
The package is currently not yet available on CRAN (the Comprehensive R Archive Network), but can be downloaded from the software development platform GitHub. How this works can be found on the corresponding GitHub page (https://github.com/xronos-ch/xronos.R). Further documentation can be obtained from the package’s page (https://r.xronos.ch/).
This is just the beginning, and we will continue our efforts to make access to our data as easy as possible, and to further expand the package. If you want to participate in the development, you are, in the spirit of open source software, welcome to do so. It already helps if you point out bugs that we might not have noticed. Have fun using and evaluating our data!