openEO

R Client v1.3.0 has been released

Written on November 17, 2022 by Matthias Mohr, Peter J. Zellner, Florian Lahn.

We released a new version of the R client (1.3.0) with new exciting improvements and a couple of new vignettes. To see the full list of changes, please consult the Changelog (opens new window).

You can get the new version through CRAN: openeo (opens new window) This means you can install or update the R client with the following command:

install.packages("openeo")

If you have trouble installing or working with the package, feel free to leave an issue in the GitHub issue tracker (opens new window).

# Better support for sf

A new feature is that sf objects can be used in processes as parameters. For example, st_bbox() can be used to pass bounding boxes more easily as spatial extent to the process load_collection. Please see the following example for details:

library(sf)
bbox = st_bbox(c(xmin=16.1,
                xmax=16.6,
                ymax=48.6,
                ymin= 47.2), crs = 4326)

data = p$load_collection(id = "SENTINEL-2",
                        spatial_extent = bbox,
                        temporal_extent = list("2018-04-01", "2018-05-01"))

You can see a full example here (opens new window).

# New Vignettes

The new vignettes cover the following topics:

  1. Process Graph Concepts (opens new window) This vignette shows the main concepts regarding the process graph building with the openeo package and explains aspects the openEO API and the openEO processes from a user perspective. It states the logical structure of an openEO process description and how process graphs are created from predefined processes. Also, the details about parameters and arguments of processes are explained, especially how this affects R, where function parameters are usually type free.

  2. Process Graph Building Application (opens new window) We describe the details on how to create process graphs and respectively "User Defined Processes" (UDP). Those processes can be seen as the analysis workflows that are run as jobs at a designated openEO back-end. They might be called later directly or some variables can be added to the UDP to customize the processes at runtime, e.g. set the temporal interval or the area of interest. This vignette focuses on the user point of view.

  3. Package Software Architecture (opens new window) This is the first part of a contribution guide which ensures that developers can effectively contribute to the R-Client. Since a server-client based package is different from most other R packages some concepts are used that most R users and developers are not so familiar with. Therefore, this contribution guide eases the process of actively contributing to the packages development or bug fixing by explaining the underlying concepts.

  4. Developer Implementation Details (opens new window) In this guide selected core mechanisms of the openEO package are described. It is targeted towards interested developers and it is highly recommended to dive into the source code, while reading through this guide. The explanations here are abstracted from the code and shall guide new developers on the concepts and routines of this package.