mapView: basic interactive viewing of spatial data in R

Tim Appelhans <tim.appelhans at gmail.com> writes:

Dear list members,

I would like to draw your attention to a little 'project' I've been
working on over the past few weeks.

Using leaflet for R, I have defined some methods for spatial data (e.g.
Raster*, Spatial* objects) to quickly visualise them in either the
RStudio Viewer pan or the default web browser. The function I created
for this is called mapView().

Think of it as an interactive version of spplot()/plot() for spatial
data (though less versatile). It enables zooming, paning and basic layer
queries (i.e. printing of the attributes in the @data slot of Spatial*
objects + the x/y location of the feature). For Raster* objects queries
are currently not available as leaflet translates the data into RGB
values for display. Furthermore, background maps can be defined and
multiple different spatial object layers can be overlaid.
At the moment mapView() lives in our Rsenal package on github
(https://github.com/environmentalinformatics-marburg/Rsenal) but this is
likely going to change at some point in the not too distant future. This
also depends on whether there is active interest in developping this
sort of thing further to provide more than the current admittedly rather
limited functionality. This, however, would involve JavaScript coding
which I do not have any experience with.

A quick (non-interactive) intorduction can be found here:

https://metvurst.wordpress.com/

The full introductory article including interactive examples is
published here:

http://environmentalinformatics-marburg.github.io/web-presentations/20150723_mapView.html

I hope this may prove useful for some of you.

This looks like something I was really missing! I was always exporting
my spatial data into GRASS and viewing it there - but this looks really
brilliant! This makes out of R a very powerful command line GIS.

I would really like to see this functionality in a separate R package on
CRAN - even with only its current functionality, it is very useful!

Thanks a lot and keep us posted,

Rainer

Also, if anyone is keen to get involved in taking this further, please
let me know and we will see how to best proceed.

Best,
Tim