[R-sig-Geo] Adding some data as colors to world map

[Roger Bivand]

On Mon, 6 Mar 2006, Gregor Gorjanc wrote:

> Hello!
> 
> I am a total newbie to map handling, but a keen R user. I have some
> estimates by numbers per country (in names, such as Germany, France,
> ...) and would like to add this information with use of color on world
> and perhaps additionally to Europe map. How can this be achieved in R?
> Any pointers to relevant literature/tutorials would be fine.
> 

Welcome! The answer depends on how you want to represent the countries 
graphically. Do you want to display the formatted numbers on a map of 
country borders, to fill the country polygons with colour or shading 
representing the values of the numbers, or maybe to put a filled bubble at 
some point representing the countries?

Which countries? Are they already in the maps package (maybe not, some of 
the borders there are rather out-of-date)?

library(maps)
map("world", xlim=c(-12,35), ylim=c(35,65))

shows you a pretty old version of Europe! There are plenty of sources of 
border maps, but getting something matching the borders you need may 
require a bit of googling (usually looking for a vector representation).

Does anybody have recommended websites for current European national 
border data (preferably in a format we can read)?

Roger

> Many thanks!
> 
> 

-- 
Roger Bivand
Economic Geography Section, Department of Economics, Norwegian School of
Economics and Business Administration, Helleveien 30, N-5045 Bergen,
Norway. voice: +47 55 95 93 55; fax +47 55 95 95 43
e-mail: Roger.Bivand at nhh.no