[R-sig-Geo] Making GIS and R play nicely - some tips?

[Michael Sumner]

>
>Is the state of the art approach to use GRASS a la Bivand and Neteler's
>paper (http://agec144.agecon.uiuc.edu/csiss/Rgeo/)? Is it better to dump the
>grids to an imagine file (or bil) and read them with rgdal? I work mostly in
>Windows (b/c of ESRI - damn them!) but switch gears onto Linux when the task
>requires it. I have never used GRASS. Show me the way!

Hello

Disclaimer - I've never used GRASS, and I haven't used ESRI much.

You might consider using Manifold GIS:  http://www.manifold.net/

Much more Windows (and user) friendly IMO, and has many options for input 
and output for most formats, as well as generic text and binary.    (Give 
it a few years and Manifold will have taken over much of the GIS market.)

You could output your grids to binary files (or ASCII), and with some 
modification of my simple script write the projection metadata to XML - 
then script-import these to Manifold.  This scripting could be done all 
within R if that was desirable using RDCOMClient

I have some R routines that export with Manifold-friendly metadata in XML, 
very rudimentary but might give you some ideas.

Passing grid (matrix) data from R to Manifold:
http://www.georeference.org/Forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=789&posts=9

Running R from Manifold:
http://www.georeference.org/Forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=650&posts=8

Running Manifold from R:
http://www.georeference.org/Forums/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=876&posts=9

Cheers, Mike.




###############################################

Michael Sumner - PhD. candidate
Maths and Physics (ACE CRC & IASOS) and Zoology (AWRU)
University of Tasmania
Private Bag 77, Hobart, Tas 7001, Australia
Phone: (03) 6226 1752

http://www.acecrc.org.au/