From the Revolutions blog:
The good folks at DataMarket have posted a new tutorial on using the rdatamarket package (covered here in August) to easily download public data sets into R for analysis.
The tutorial describes how to install the rdatamarket package, how to extract metadata for data sets, and how to download the data themselves into R. The tutorial also illustrates a feature of the package I wasn’t previously aware of: you can use dimension filtering to extract just the portion of the dataset you need: for example, to read just the population data for specific countries from the entire UN World Population dataset.
DataMarket Blog: Using DataMarket from within R