Open Data Kit Collect form generator package

For disciplines that do fieldwork in remote locations to collect research data, there may be some potential for R to help with the data collection workflow. Open Data Kit is a popular tool for mobile data collection for Android devices. Their data collection app is called ODK Collect, and supports a wide variety of inputs (text, number, location, multimedia, barcodes, images, video, etc.), and works great offline.

Currently, the user has a variety of options for designing their data collection form, such as a web tool, a python library, or an app that will convert an Excel sheet to the ODK form. The form itself is an XML file.

An R package for designing the ODK Collect form would allow the user to create their forms with R code, so they can make form-building reproducible, version controlled and well documented. Plus the obvious advantages (for the monoglot R user, at least) of having R at the start and the end of their data collection and analysis workflow.

A first pass at this might be converting the pyxform python package (which makes XForms) to R.