Look back to the Web Technologies Task View we talked about in the previous section. There are a tremendous amount of R packages specifically designed to import data directly from specialized sources on the web. Among these are packages to search for and retrieve the full text of academic articles in the Public Library of Science journals (rplos), to search for and download the full text of Wikipedia articles (WikipediR), to download data about Berlin from the German government (BerlinData), to interface with the Chromosome Counts Database (chromer), to download historical financial data (quantmod), and to access the information in the PubChem chemistry database (rpubchem).
These examples notwithstanding, given that there are many hundreds of immense repositories of public data, it is far too much to expect the R community to have a package specially built...
