Tempo – an R package to access the TEMPO-Online database
Marian Necula, Ana-Maria Tiru, Bogdan Oancea · DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2019
One of the objectives of official statistical authorities is to extend and diversify the methods used to disseminate data, in order to satisfy various and ever-changing user needs. This paper presents the second iteration of Tempo, an R package that provides access to statistical information stored under Romanian National Institute of Statistics (NSI) public database, 1TEMPO-Online. Tempo provides a collection of custom functions to download, explore and visualize statistical data in an automated and convenient manner. Access to data is enabled by TEMPO-Online Service Application Programming Interface (API), which exposes JSON-based datasets and metadata. To access the API from R, Tempo relies on “curl” package. The Tempo package also brings in a visualization feature based on “ggplot2” package. This feature allows the user to render a selected dataset as a gradient mesh over the Romanian country map.