Preface

For Demonstration purposes only. Under development.

A web app is application software that runs on a web server. It provides interactivity for users to explore its content and can provide live updating of the information displayed. However, building web apps would often require specialist knowledge in web development. Web development frameworks such as Shiny (Chang et al. 2021) provides an easy way for scientists to build prototype web apps with the R language only. This means scientists can rapidly build these web apps themselves to engage their sceintific outputs with users.

The NERC DataLabs project (https://datalabs.datalabs.ceh.ac.uk) is a cloud-based cyberinfrastructure to allow environmental scientists to collaborate and share outputs more seamlessly. It includes powerful data store and notebooks environments and easy tools to publish Shiny apps.

This live book provides an entry point for users to discover the various use cases of Shiny web apps to advance envrionmental data science in DataLabs. It is live because it is dynamic and DataLabs users are welcome to add content to it. It also demonstrates to stakeholders the capabilities and added value UKCEH and the wider research community can offer to deliver projects via the use of Shiny apps.

Although each of the example apps discussed here have their specific use cases, where possible it also includes code snippets or a generic/minimal version of the app so that it can be readily transferable to other projects and applications.

All of the content of this repository is licensed CC0.This bookdown book is created using the template created by Pete Levy.

References

Chang, Winston, Joe Cheng, JJ Allaire, Carson Sievert, Barret Schloerke, Yihui Xie, Jeff Allen, Jonathan McPherson, Alan Dipert, and Barbara Borges. 2021. Shiny: Web Application Framework for R. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=shiny.