GIS Tasks in R
In addition to Rogers advise, you might take a peek at the functions available in postgis. Once you have polys in the postgis database, you can do quite a lot of geometry ops by eg "select intersection(poly1, poly2) from tabname" and so on. There's some grunt work involved. Its certainly not pointy-clicky (although QGIS and GRASS have some ability to work with postgis). I have found some useful functions there. Documentation is pretty good too. THK
On 2/6/07, CJ Jackson <cwjacksonjr at hotmail.com> wrote:
Hi everyone, I'm currently working on my PhD (geology) and would like to explore the possible GIS capabilities of R. I currently use ESRI's ArcView (3.x), ArcGIS (9.1), and ArcInfo (9) software for all of my GIS work. I have written an "extension" for the old ArcView that performs various analyses of points/polylines/polygons and have been wanting to update the extension for the latest version of ArcGIS to help me solve various research problems. With that being said, I discovered 'R' last year and fell in love with it and have been using it for data analysis of attribute tables from GIS Shapefiles. Ultimately, as part of my research, I would like to make a package for R that would handle various GIS tasks of shapefiles themselves, not just their data tables. It would be great to have a analysis package for my research that is not solely dependent on ESRI's software. Furthermore, I dread programming in Visual Basic for the new ArcGIS because I have limited programming skills. Here are some of the tasks I would like to perform: - produce a new point shapefile that contains points where two or more shapefiles with polylines intersect - intersect two or more shapefiles with polygons and store the results in a new shapefile - calculate area of polygons - calculate the distance from a point shapefile to another point shapefile Is this possible in R, or, am I barking up the wrong tree? Thanks! cj
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Timothy H. Keitt, University of Texas at Austin Contact info and schedule at http://www.keittlab.org/tkeitt/ Reprints at http://www.keittlab.org/tkeitt/papers/ ODF attachment? See http://www.openoffice.org/