Documentation on "next steps" of working with Zarr data in R

[sharlagelfand]

Hi again! I wanted to bring up the possibility of adding additional documentation to this package. I find it's super helpful in understanding how to read in Zarr arrays, but as a newer user of Zarr (and someone who is writing a lot of documentation about using it myself!), I did find myself a bit stumped when I started using it, because I read in the Zarr arrays and felt a little bit like... "what's next?".

I'm not sure what your group's use case is for Zarr, or what packages you use to visualize, analyze, etc Zarr data once it's read in. Would love to just open up a conversation about this, to see if there is any interest in adding additional documentation. I am totally happy to contribute -- I've written this tutorial about working with Zarr data, which includes some examples using e.g. the stars and terra packages to reformat and visualize data. I've also seen this post but it doesn't seem like there's a ton else out there.

Looking forward to discussing!

[Bisaloo]

Thanks for opening this issue. I get where you're coming from and I received identical feedback on a different package reading binary data files during its review.

On the other hand, I think it makes sense for the package documentation to focus on the package direct functionality.

It is definitely good & useful to have more complete tutorials integrating multiple packages but my first intuition is that these tutorials should probably live outside the repository.

The problem is then indeed how to make sure that users find these tutorials.

Maybe a reasonable and manageable approach would be to have a special link in the pkgdown website saying something like "use cases" and then link out to tutorials and examples from various application domains.

What do you think?

[sharlagelfand]

Just following up based on our discussion; agreed that it makes sense for the package to focus on its direct functionality, which is reading Zarr arrays. I think adding an article to the pkgdown site that links use cases would be super helpful. Once the documentation I'm working on lives in a more "permanent" place, I can create a pull request that would add an article and link to the documentation, and will definitely keep an eye out for other helpful links that I find.