Creating a better universe with dverse
Regular talk, 9:40 - 10:40 AM
The Tidyverse popularized the idea of a “package universe.” A typical universe has a meta-package that centralizes access to functions and data across all its packages. For example by using library(tidyverse) the tidyverse meta-package centralizes access to functions and data from dplyr ggplot2 and several other packages within the Tidyverse universe.
However meta-packages typically do not centralize documentation. For example the tidyverse website only displays the documentation for tidyverse but not for dplyr ggplot2 and other packages in the Tidyverse. A notable exception is tidymodels whose website allows users to search the documentation for all its packages at https://www.tidymodels.org/find/all though its implementation is ad hoc and complex.
This talk introduces a new package that solves this problem (https://maurolepore.github.io/dverse/). dverse creates a data.frame with metadata related to the documentation of any set of packages. This data.frame can be easily used to generate the standard reference section of a website with pkgdown. In this way dverse centralizes the documentation of any universe simply and in the expected place.
This way dverse connects multiple packages and their developers. In large and distributed universes like the Pharmaverse a central documentation built with dverse provides the opportunity for each developer to discover and learn about the others. The result is better documentation packages and community.
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Pronouns: he/himAstoria, OR, USAMauro Lepore is a Research Software Engineer focused on building open source systems in and around R. I've developed several R packages on CRAN and Shiny apps that help make data more accessible. I contribute to the R community as an associate editor and mentor at rOpenSci, and as an instructor with The Carpentries. I'm especially interested in making research more reproducible, open, and collaborative. |