convo

The goal of convo is to enable the creation of a a controlled vocabularly for naming columns in a relational dataset as described in my blog post Column Names as Contracts. This controlled vocabularly can then be used to check a set of names for adherence, to automate documentation, and to generate data checks via the pointblank package.

Installation

You can install the development version of convo from GitHub with:

devtools::install_github("emilyriederer/convo")

Features

Available

  • Define controlled vocabularly (a convo) in R or YAML including valid name stubs at different levels of the ontology and optional descriptions or validation checks
  • Parse stub lists (candidate convos) from a set of variables
  • Evaluate if a set of names adheres to a convo and identify violations
  • Compare convo objects and/or stub lists with set-like operations (union, intersect, setdiff) to identify new candidates for inclusion
  • Generate a pointblank validation agent or YAML file from a convo object for data validation
  • Document a dataset with network diagrams or a table

Current Limitations / Future Enhancements

  • Define overall metadata for controlled vocabularly metadata such as:
    • overall descriptor string
    • human-readable names describing each level
  • Richer control over levels. Currently can only evaluate starting from the front, but in the future could:
    • allow some levels to be optional
    • work from both front and the back
  • Current levels are independent of one another
    • could allow for truly hierarchical ontologies where allowed level 2 stubs vary by level 1 stub used
  • Current assumption is that realizations of a controlled vocabularly are all delimited by the same separator
    • to work better with filepaths, might potentially want to enable multiple types of delimeters
  • Current regex support slightly unreliable. Need to better document and expand
  • More aesthetic documentation (describe_*() functions)
  • Better set operations for combining instead of overwriting full convo specifications (not just stub lists)
  • Explore integration with dm package to validate names across a schema

Example

Main pieces of functionality are illustrated in the Quick Start Guide on the package website.