Other popular online data formats

Structured data is often available in XML or JSON formats on the Web. The high popularity of these two formats is due to the fact that both are human-readable, easy to handle from a programmatic point of view, and can manage any type of hierarchical data structure, not just a simple tabular design, as CSV files are.

Note

JSON is originally derived from JavaScript Object Notation, which recently became one of the top, most-used standards for human-readable data exchange format. JSON is considered to be a low-overhead alternative to XML with attribute-value pairs, although it also supports a wide variety of object types such as number, string, boolean, ordered lists, and associative arrays. JSON is highly used in Web applications, services, and APIs.

Of course, R also supports loading (and saving) data in JSON. Let's demonstrate that by fetching some data from the previous example via the Socrata API (more on that later in the R packages to interact with...