README.md

In tobiasziegler/openaustralia: OpenAustralia API Bindings for R

openaustralia

Overview

openaustralia provides an R interface to the API for OpenAustralia.org.au.

Installation

To get the current development version of the package:

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("tobiasziegler/openaustralia")

Getting Started

1. Get an OpenAustralia API key. You'll need to create an OpenAustralia account first, unless you already have one.

2. Make the API key available in your R session:

   • Recommended (and sustainable) method: Put the line OPENAUSTRALIA_API_KEY=<paste your key> to a plain text file named .Renviron in your home directory. If ~/.Renviron doesn't already exist, just create a new file with that line. Also, ensure there is an empty line at the end of the file. Restart R, and the package will now automatically use your API key every time you call its functions.

   • Alternative (and temporary) method: In your R session (whether at the console or via a script), call openaustralia::set_api_key("<paste your key"). The package will store the key in an environment variable and use it throughout the current R session, but you'll need to set it again whenever you start a new session.

3. That's it! You should be all set to start accessing the API functions.

Licences

This package is made available under the GNU General Public License (sic) v3.0, and includes code adapted from the twfy package created by Will Lowe.

As OpenAustralia's licensing page explains:

Parliamentary material (that's data returned from getDebates and getHansard), is Copyright Commonwealth of Australia and is provided by them under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence.

Our own data - lists of members of the House of Representatives, Senators, electoral divisions and so on - is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license version 2.5.

Low volume, non-commercial use of the API service itself is free. Please contact us for commercial use, or if you are about to use the service on a large scale.

tobiasziegler/openaustralia documentation built on May 4, 2019, 4:25 p.m.