DANTE Tools

The DANTE toolkit aims to address a range of technical issues that present common barriers to data analysts working within the interdisciplinary environment-security research sector. While there is an abundance of web based mapping and other exploratory data services, there is a dearth of tools and materials for intermediate or advanced users. At present DANTE maintains multiple R packages developed to assist with laborious tasks in applied political, environmental, and geo sciences. These include:

• Provide ready access to relevant literature documenting analytic methods, datasets, and toolkits.

• Acquire and maintain regularly updated datasets.

• Harmonize datasets by performing country/administrative code matching, translation between incompatible units of analysis, and resolving differences in temporal and spatial resolution.

• Perform integrated analysis of tabular, geospatial feature, and geospatial raster data.

• Relay and demonstrate the principles of open science and reproducible research.

• Provide well documented vignettes and end-to-end analytic use cases.

Although DANTE currently focuses on the R statistical computing platform, contributions from other open source platforms are welcomed. The DANTE project has multiple R packages in early development.