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polygon adjacency testing

On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Barry Rowlingson wrote:

            
Barry,

The input shapefile is the one on Lance Waller's website:

http://www.sph.emory.edu/~lwaller/ch9index.htm

which may have been "doctored" to link the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland 
to the mainland, with unforeseen consequences. poly2nb() should *not* link 
these islands unless they are contiguous! After examination in Saga, 
zooming in close, the slivers do seem to have been "added" to generate 
contiguities for non-contiguous polygons, but that someone's enthusiasm 
has run away with them. Did you try identifying the extraneous slivers, 
seeing if they are duplicated, if so delete the "foreign" one, if not do 
union on them with the contiguous big polygon? They are tiny, so accessing 
the area slot of the Polygon objects should show which is which.

Best wishes,

Roger