[Openspace] Re: Qgis-Rmanage and geographic display of spatialobjects
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. 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).
I tend to agree with this idea for that particular project, but for manageR, displaying sp objects would be great!
Yes! I think in the end this would
require an ogr/gdal driver for sp objects as Barry Rowlingson has previously suggested here, and in the r-sig-geo lists. I have started to look at some brushing and linking functions using the iPlots R package, and should hopefully be able to implement some of these things in the future...?
Actually, perhaps we could make people from Rosuda get interested on developing an "igeoplots" package! Agus
Carson Agustin Lobo wrote:
Thanks Carson, just knowing that this is an R console is enough. Now, after making a simple plot(), I'm just dreaming: if we could display sp objects directly, not only avoiding the intermediate shp file but being able of plotting columns of the dataframe as statistical graphics in R... and soon being able to interact between the R plot and the geographic display (a linked brushing, for example), tools like in GeoDa but with a real GIS diaplay... Great job! (I'm forwarding the r-sig-geo list just for them to know your developments) Agus
Dr. Agustin Lobo Institut de Ciencies de la Terra "Jaume Almera" (CSIC) LLuis Sole Sabaris s/n 08028 Barcelona Spain Tel. 34 934095410 Fax. 34 934110012 email: Agustin.Lobo at ija.csic.es http://www.ija.csic.es/gt/obster _______________________________________________ Openspace mailing list Openspace at sal.uiuc.edu http://sal.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/openspace