odkr: Open Data Kit (ODK) R API

Open Data Kit (ODK) is a free and open-source set of tools which help organizations author, field, and manage mobile data collection solutions. ODK provides an out-of-the-box solution for users to:

Build a data collection form or survey;
Collect the data on a mobile device and send it to a server; and
Aggregate the collected data on a server and extract it in useful formats.

odkr is a set of interface and utility tools for a useR working with ODK. The package currently has two classes of functions: 1) data processing tools; and, 2) ODK-R interface functions.

For data processing, there are currently three functions included which can be used to perform typical data processing tasks associated with working with ODK-collected datasets such as renaming variables in a dataset, expansion of responses to questions that allow more than one answer and merging of nested datasets.

For ODK-R interface, included are a set of functions that work via a command line interface with the Java application ODK Briefcase for fetching and pushing Open Data Kit (ODK) forms and their contents. It can be used to gather and aggregate data from the mobile client ODK Collect when there is no internet connectivity, when there is no ODK Aggregate Server set-up or when an ODK Aggregate Server is not preferred. Current production version of ODK Briefcase is v1.8.0 and an executable .jar file can be downloaded from the Open Data Kit website.

As of ODK Briefcase version 1.4.4, a scriptable command line interface (CLI) to the Java application has been available. This package provides an R interface to ODK Briefcase via the available CLI to pull forms from a remote ODK Aggregate Server or from a local ODK folder /odk collected from mobile clients. This package has a function that downloads the latest version of ODK Briefcase (currently v1.8.0) and additional functions that use the CLI of ODK Briefcase to perform data extraction and data export. This package requires Java 8 installed. Java 8 can be downloaded from here.

For more information on the {odkr} package, you can visit the project website. To learn about the underlying code for this software development project, see the GitHub code repository.

If you are interested in contributing to this project, please be aware of its Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. To see a list of features that we are either actively working on, are considering, or need help on, visit our GitHub issues page. If you find something that you can help with, follow these steps on how to contribute.