Access and analysis of ISTAC data through the use of R and Shiny

Abstract

The increasing availability of open data resources provides opportunities for research and data science. It is necessary to develope tools that take advantage of the full potential of new information resources. In this work we developed the package for R istacr that provides a collection of eurostat functions to be able to consult and discard the data that Eurostat, including functions to retrieve, download and manipulate the data set available through the ISTAC BASE API of the Canary Institute of Statistics (ISTAC). In addition, A Shiny app was designed for a responsive visulization of the data. This develope is part of the growing demand for open data and ecosystems dedicated to reproducible research in computational social science and digital humanities. With this interest, this package has been included within rOpenSpain, a project that aims to promote transparent research methods mainly through the use of free software and open data in Spain.