Qgis-Rmanage and geographic display of spatial objects
Agustin Lobo wrote:
Carson Farmer wrote:
This is certainly where I would like to see manageR go someday! But unfortunately this would entail programming in C, which requires someone much more skilled than myself! For now I simply use it instead of jumping between the two applications... Your suggestion about displaying sp objects was a topic of discussion for the QGIS bridge2R team (of which I am a member), but we ended up putting this aside, as we felt that the average QGIS user would rather have all the R stuff happen 'behind the scenes' on their input vector layers directly, rather than knowingly interacting with R.
I cannot but disagree here. "QGIS user have all the R stuff happen 'behind the scenes'" because they cannot have it on the scenario. I strongly recommend having a look to GeoDa to feel the power of interactive exploratory geographic data analysis. It is a fundamental step for thinking and generating hypothesis that are formally tested afterwards and then interactively displayed again. Unfortunately, GeoDa does not have a real geographic display, as would be the case of QGis, and does not have the amazing flexibility of R. I note that GeoDa is becoming OS at some point, and could be an excellent source of inspiration.
Reading over my last post, I can see that I wasn't clear on this point. What I meant to say was: Brushing and Linking is good, and would be very nice to have (and in fact I do have a graphing plugin that does this in the works as I write), but we are talking about two separate things here: 1) The bridge2R project; the primary goal here (I think, other people can correct me here) is to provide a user-friendly means of doing statistical analysis in QGIS. The fact that we are using R is simply secondary (though the flexibility and extensibility of R means that we can continue to add functionality to QGIS long into the future), and thus this project should provide statistical operations to non-R-users and R-users alike. This means that brushing and linking can be incorporated into these operations, but the user shouldn't know that it's R and Rpy doing all the work. 2) The second point is something like manageR, or some other direct link between R and QGIS. I imagine this as something of interest to more advanced R-users, who want to be able to knowingly work in R, and interact with QGIS at the same time. This is what I am most interested in, and am looking for ways to make manageR closer to this type of tool. This could also support brushing and linking eventually...?
Also, note how powerful would be applying R syntaxis to the data tables associated to vector data. This is very easy with the "data slot" of R SpatialDataFrame objects, but there is always the annoying step of going through the shp export to display in QGIS (although I think that your Rmanage makes easier the step).
and hopefully I made this even easier with my latest update.
Actually, perhaps we could make people from Rosuda get interested on developing an "igeoplots" package!
Their website indicates that there will be interactive mapping abilities (based on maptools) soon-ish... Carson