README.md
In SondergardM/MSDRCapstone: Interactive Earthquate Map and Related Data

MSDR Capstone Project - Interactive Earthquake Map

Package: MSDRCapstone - completed as part of Coursera Mastering Software Development with R Specialization.

GitHub: https://github.com/SondergardM/MSDRCapstone

The functions in this R package utilize data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) Global Significant Earthquake Database, which is a covers significant earthquakes from 2150 B.C. to the present. For the purposes of this package, data was downloaded from the year 2000 A.D. to the present and has been included in the package (data set noaa_data). The data set includes 1219 observations and 39 fields.

The functions in this package are designed to utilize data from NOAA’s earthquake database and produce two basic sets of plots: (1) the first is an earthquake timeline for a given country (or countries) that shows the date and magnitude of the earthquake, along with data labels for the five most significant quakes in the data chosen by the user; (2) an HTML map showing the geographic locale of the earthquake along with either a date or other related data shown as a pop-up label when the user clicks on a given earthquake location.

The package consists of six (6) functions:

eq_location_clean() - Function strips out country name for data downloaded from the NOAA earthquake database and converts the column names to title case for readability.
eq_clean_data() - Function combines Year, Month and Day fields into a single date variable and prepares the data for use in plots.
geom_timeline() - Function plots a time line for earthquakes ranging from “xmin” to “xmax” dates, with a point for each earthquake. The x aesthetic is a date and the y aesthetic is a factor indicating some stratification, in which case multiple time lines will be plotted for each level of the factor (e.g. country).
geom_timeline_label() - Function adds annotations to the earthquake data provided by the geom_timeline() function. The geom adds a vertical line to each data point with a text annotation providing the location of the earthquake. The x aesthetic is a date of the earthquake and a label which takes the column name from which annotations will be obtained.
eq_map() - Function creates an interactive map showing the location of earthquakes in the given earthquakes data set. The size of the circles in the map are proportional to the magnitude of the earthquakes. The map is interactive, and when you click on a link, a popup label shows the annotation as specified by the annot_col variable.
eq_create_label() - Function creates a more descriptive and HTML-formatted popup label to be used with the eq_map() function. This function creates a vector of HTML-formatted labels using supplied data from the eathquakes data set. The label contains the following information:
- Date in YMD format
- Location Name (as cleaned by the eq_location_clean() function)
- Earthquake magnitude (Richter scale)
- Total Deaths caused by the event