cRunch

cRunch provides an infrastructure for exploratory data analysis with the statistical programming language and environment R. cRunch helps users to create 'living reports' with embedded data and processing scripts. A small 'data shop' helps in releasing data sets to the public. cRunch is optimised for in-core calculations of computationally-intense problems.

Provider

Knowledge Media Institute, Open University.

Licensing and cost

Offered for free (on a fair-use basis) to researchers. The components out of which cRunch is built are open source.

Development Activity

cRunch runs the RStudio server (currently version v0.97.551). cRunch is further developed within the TELL-ME project, which is partially funded by the European Commission.

Platform and interoperability

cRunch incorporates open source components including

• RStudio;
• RApache;
• knitr.

Documentation and user support

The cRunch wiki contains notes, tutorials and how-to pages.

Usability

The cRunch Studio runs in a regular web browser.

Expertise required

Some knowledge of R is required, though this can picked up fairly quickly by anyone with a basic knowledge of any other programming or scripting language.

Standards compliance

There are more than 6800 packages for R, many of which implement open standards. For example, the tm architecture offers an alternative to other natural language processing frameworks (such as the ones offered in Java or Python).

Influence and take-up

cRunch currently has a small, but growing community of a bit more than 100 analytics developers gathered around it.