Weather forecast and good development practices by Paolo Sonego.
From the post:
Inspired by this tutorial, I thought that it would be nice to have the possibility to have access to weather forecast directly from the R command line, for example for a personalized start-up message such as the one below:
Weather summary for Trieste, Friuli-Venezia Giulia:
The weather in Trieste is clear. The temperature is currently 14°C (57°F). Humidity: 63%.Fortunately, thanks to the always useful Duncan Temple Lang’s XML package (see here for a tutorial about XML programming under R), it is straightforward to write few lines of R code to invoke the google weather api for the location of interest, retrieve the XML file, parse it using the XPath paradigm and get the required informations:
You may need weather information for your topic map but more importantly, it will be useful if small routines or libraries are written for common data sets. There is little reason for multiple libraries for say census data, unless the data is substantially different.