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

[Gregor Gorjanc]

Roger Bivand wrote:
> 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?

Filling country polygons with different colors would be just fine.
Perhaps also filled bubble, but that one might not be so good since our
eyes are bad at interpreting circles. Are there any examples where I
could start with? Say I would like to color Australia with blue, states
with red, Argentina with green etc. I will rather play with some color
palette, but that would be more than great for the start.

> 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 the borders there are rather out-of-date)?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).

Yes, my country is missing ;)

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

Hmm, this is then the main bottleneck - the maps.

> 
>>Many thanks!
>>
>>
> 
> 


-- 
Lep pozdrav / With regards,
    Gregor Gorjanc

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University of Ljubljana     PhD student
Biotechnical Faculty
Zootechnical Department     URI: http://www.bfro.uni-lj.si/MR/ggorjan
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