In patzaw/TKCat: Tailored Knowledge Catalog

library(knitr)
library(TKCat)
cranRef <- function(x){
  sprintf(
    "[%s](https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=%s): %s",
    x, x, packageDescription(x)$Title
  )
}

Tailored Knowledge Catalog

The aim of TKCat (Tailored Knowledge Catalog) is to facilitate the management of data from knowledge resources that are frequently used alone or together in research environments. In TKCat, knowledge resources are manipulated as modeled database (MDB) objects. These objects provide access to the data tables along with a general description of the resource and a detail data model generated with ReDaMoR documenting the tables, their fields and their relationships. These MDB are then gathered in catalogs that can be easily explored an shared. TKCat provides tools to easily subset, filter and combine MDBs and create new catalogs suited for specific needs.

This package has been presented at the useR!2022 conference and here are the slides.

The TKCat R package is licensed under GPL-3.

Installation

From CRAN

install.packages("TKCat")

Dependencies

The following R packages available on CRAN are required:

deps <- desc::desc_get_deps()
sdeps <- filter(deps, type %in% c("Depends", "Imports") & package!="R")
for(p in sdeps$package){
   cat(paste("-", cranRef(p)), sep="\n")
}

And those are suggested:

wdeps <- filter(deps, type=="Suggests" & package!="R")
for(p in wdeps$package){
   cat(paste("-", cranRef(p)), sep="\n")
}

From github

devtools::install_github("patzaw/TKCat")

Documentation

Introduction to TKCat (vignette("TKCat"))
Defining and using Requirements for Knowledge Management (vignette("TKCat-KMR-POK"))

Alternatives

The dm package provides similar features but with different implementation choices. Here are the main differences:
- The dm data model feature is built upon the datamodelr package whereas TKCat relies on ReDaMoR.
- Both dm and TKCat provides mechanisms to check the fulfillment of the data model constrains and tools to automatically take advantage of them.
- dm supports connection to many different DBMS. It also take advantage of constraints which are documented in the DBMS when available. TKCat only supports the ClickHouse system through the ClickHouseHTTP or RClickhouse packages.
- TKCat implements 3 main types of MDB based on files, memory tables or ClickHouse database. It also provides mechanisms to automatically convert from and to any of these implementations.
- TKCat supports catalogs of MDBs facilitating the exploration of existing data. It also allows the integration of different MDBs through the automatic identification of similar concepts (Collections) and the automatic conversion of the different vocabulary on which they rely.