ruODK: An R Client for the ODK Central API

Especially in these trying times, it is important to ask “r u ODK?”.

ruODK is an R client to access and parse data from ODK Central.

OpenDataKit (ODK) isfree-and open-source software that helps millions of people collect data quickly, accurately, offline, and at scale. The software is in active use in every country in the world and is supported by a large and helpful community.

ruODK is a community contribution to the ODK ecosystem, but not directly affiliated with ODK.

ruODK assumes some familiarity of its users with the ODK ecosystem and workflows. For a detailed overview, read the extensiveODK documentation and visit the friendlyODK forum.

ODK Central is a cloud-based data clearinghouse for digitally captured data, replacing the older softwareODK Aggregate. ODK Central manages user accounts and permissions, stores form definitions, and allows data collection clients likeODK Collect to connect to it for form download and submission upload.

A typicalODK workflow: An XForm is designed e.g. inODK Build,published to ODK Central, and downloaded onto an Android device running ODK Collect. After data have been captured digitally usingODK Collect, the data are uploaded and stored in ODK Central. The next step from there is to extract the data, optionally upload it into another data warehouse, and then to analyse and generate insight from it.

While data can be retrieved in bulk through the GUI, ODK Central’s API provides access to its data and functionality through both an OData and a RESTful API with a comprehensive and interactivedocumentation.

ruODK is aimed at the technically minded researcher who wishes to access and process data from ODK Central using the programming language R.

Benefits of using the R ecosystem in combination with ODK:

• Scalability: Both R and ODK are free and open source software. Scaling to many users does not incur license fees.
• Ubiquity: R is known to many scientists and is widely taught at universities.
• Automation: The entire data access and analysis workflow can be automated through R scripts.
• Reproducible reporting (e.g.Sweave,RMarkdown), interactive web apps (Shiny), workflow scaling (drake).
• Rstudio-as-a-Service (RaaS) at

ruODK’s scope:

• To wrap all ODK Central API endpoints with a focus ondata access.
• To provide working examples of interacting with the ODK Central API.
• To provide convenience helpers for the day to day tasks when working with ODK Central data in R:data munging the ODK Central API output into tidy R formats.

ruODK’s use cases:

• Smaller projects: ExamplerOzCBI
  1. Data collection: ODK Collect
  2. Data clearinghouse: ODK Central
  3. Data analysis and reporting:Rmd (ruODK)
  4. Publishing and dissemination:ckanr,CKAN
• Larger projects:
  1. Data collection: ODK Collect
  2. Data clearinghouse: ODK Central
  3. ETL pipeline into data warehouses:Rmd (ruODK)
  4. QA: in data warehouse
  5. Reporting:Rmd
  6. Publishing and dissemination:ckanr,CKAN

Out of scope:

• To wrap “management” API endpoints. ODK Central is aVueJS/NodeJS application which provides a comprehensive graphical user interface for the management of users, roles, permissions, projects, and forms.
• To provide extensive data visualisation. We show only minimal examples of data visualisation and presentation, mainly to illustrate the example data. Once the data is in your hands as tidy tibbles… urODK!

# Enable the rOpenSci universeoptions(repos=c(  ropensci="https://ropensci.r-universe.dev",  CRAN="https://cloud.r-project.org"))install.packages("ruODK")

if(!requireNamespace("remotes"))install.packages("remotes")# Full installremotes::install_github("ropensci/ruODK@main",  dependencies=TRUE,  upgrade="always",  build_vignettes=TRUE)# Minimal install without vignettesremotes::install_github("ropensci/ruODK@main",  dependencies=TRUE,  upgrade="ask",  build_vignettes=FALSE)

citation("ruODK")#> To cite ruODK in publications use (with the correct version number:#>#>   Mayer, Florian Wendelin. (2020, Nov 19).  ruODK: An R Client for the ODK Central API (Version X.X.X).  Zenodo.#>   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5559164#>#> A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is#>#>   @Misc{,#>     title = {ruODK: Client for the ODK Central API},#>     author = {Florian W. Mayer},#>     note = {R package version X.X.X},#>     year = {2020},#>     url = {https://github.com/ropensci/ruODK},#>   }