SchoolDataIT: An R Package to Retrieve, Harmonise and Map Open Data Regarding the Italian School System

The R package presented here aims at gathering the existing information regarding the Italian public school system, with particular regards to the infrastructural state of schools. Input data are freely accessible online, hence they are gathered in real time from the internet. We also include the Invalsi census survey, typically considered a thorough indicator of education quality. The package is articulated in four main groups of functions. The first ones scrape the inputs from the source web pages; the second ones are employed for basic data editing; the third group of functions aggregates the data at a given territorial level, either municipalities (LAU) or provinces (NUTS-3); lastly, the mapping functions render the final datasets via static or interactive maps.