[R] Hosting a R Graph Gallery?

[Robert Cunningham]

Earlier I suggested as a *start* for the R-gallery to process the
examples in R base and in the packages on CRAN. However, this was only
as a start It seems to me that there are three types of images that
would be useful in such a gallery;

1: The processed examples of base and CRAN
2: Figures based upon code AND data sent in by users
3: Figures with code but WITHOUT data sent in by users (we could
have figures without code or data [pure decorations] I would not support that myself)

I think a package to automate production of gallery items would
certainly be useful. I would suggest the basic function in the package
would be one that produces the a Gallery Item with whatever details
and in whatever format is suitable. Other functions may allow
automatic submission of the Gallery Item and another would allow bulk
processing of packages etc by looping over the function etc (Paul
Murrell's graphicsQC package already processes all the example images
in a package).

I agree with Paul Murrell that storage in a database would be the best
option though probably more difficult to set up at the start.

I agree with Sander Om that encouraging SVG would be nice.

I looked at the Japanese R-Wiki mentioned by Shigeru Mase and the
RGallery Eric Lecoutre mentioned and certainly these are the *sort* of
things we are interested in though perhaps with different formats and
language ;-) I also agree with Gabor Grothendieck that it would be
useful to make use of the existing R Wiki, though this depends on how
much Gallery Item processing we would expect the host to do and whether
this could be arranged on the Wiki.

I guess how much the server would be expected to do is a critical
question, from there we could proceed to the details of a Gallery Item
format and then functions and a package.


Cheers, 


Robert Cunningham