Create ESRI personal geodatabase (.mdb) in R?
Hello. I think it's good idea for R to use SpatiaLite instead of dealing with shapefiles directly. SpatiaLite has functions of Raster GIS and routing, so these functions will enrich spatial analyses in R. It'll be better SQLite/SpatiaLite embedded within R as internal DB. I hope some day R will be running with SpatiaLite and Grass GIS on iPhone, Android and Nokia 900 for field working. Regards.
--- Roger Bivand <Roger.Bivand at nhh.no> wrote:
On Sat, 24 Oct 2009, Dan Putler wrote:
The response I got from the gdal-dev list is that
starting in GDAL/OGR
1.6.0 there is a read-only driver or SpatiaLite
files, and that there is
currently a working read and write driver for
SpatiaLite in the GDAL/OGR
1.7.0 SVN. OSGEO4W currently has the default
install GDAL/OGR 1.5.4, but
GDAL/OGR 1.6.0 as an advanced install option.
Eventually the SpatialLite
read/write capability for GDAL/OGR will make it to
OSGEO4W, so it is
something of a moot point now.
Dan, I agree that something more robust than shapefiles would be an advance, but this possible alternative does depend on relatively many users having access to read and write functionality. With regard to spatial objects and SQLite, had you considered giving the CRAN SQLiteMap package a trial run? http://cran.r-project.org/package=SQLiteMap It is using a different set of extensions from SpatiaLite, but has been available for some time and does run cross-platform for R users. I haven't used it myself, but it is self-contained (no dependencies other than those on CRAN).