#Half-time report from the tree-for-all hackathon
Apart from being a great deal for fun, the R projects at the OpenTreeOfLife hackathon have been making some good progress.
##Introducing rotl
Francois Michonneau, Jeremy Brown and I have been working on a package that wraps the OpenTree's various data APIs to allow users to search for trees, taxa and phylogenetic studies and pull down trees into their R sessions. Although we've started by focusing on low-level functions that wrap a single API call, there are all ready a few interesting functions (check out the repo's README for a couple of examples).
We've been working with Python and Ruby developers to generate complientary libraries, and hope to use the rest of the week to finish some convience functions that wrap up multiple calls to the OpenTree APIs to achieve interesting things, and finish out test suite and documentation.
Jorrit Poelen and Alex Harkess have been working on various R/python scripts and Tutorials to attach and visualize character state data on trees, and porting these scripts into the more interactive Arbor environment. We're pulling in character state data from various sources, like rGlobi, the Tree of Sex database, or from user-inputted character matrices. While a user can input their own phylogenetic tree, we're working with Francois and David to allow a user to extract a tree directly from OpenTree. We're hoping to have some nice tutorials finished soon that describe start-to-finish workflows to producing plots.