[R] UK map in R

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 9:10 PM, happy naren <narender.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> i am currently working on a problem where i need to plot latitude and
> longitude data on a respective county of UK. After this i want to plot
> altitude data to make a 3d surface on which then i have to plot my
> corresponding data.

 Have you read the Spatial Task View on CRAN?

http://ftp.heanet.ie/mirrors/cran.r-project.org/web/views/Spatial.html

 Do you want to plot point data on a map of the whole of the UK with
county boundaries? These boundaries do change so you'll need to
specify a year if you need that precision. There's a set here:

http://gadm.org/

 but they might not be counties, they may be EU NUTS areas which are
close to counties at one level. Obviously Scotland (still part of the
UK) doesn't have counties at all. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counties_of_the_United_Kingdom

 for all the details on UK administrative regions, historic counties etc etc.

 For your 3d plot, do you need an accurate elevation model of the UK?
At what precision? The best free elevation model I know is the SRTM
data, and you'd have to download the relevant section. To do 3d plots,
use the rgl package - do: library(rgl) ; example(terrain3d) for the
kind of thing.

 Any other questions are probably best sent to the R-spatial mailing
list, but you should probably do a bit more research first.

Barry