[R-sig-Geo] which data format should I buy

[Roger Bivand]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2007, Jan Wijffels wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> I'm a newbie to spatial statistics and I'm considering to buy a map of 
> Belgium with its communes. If I go to the website of the national 
> geographical institute of Belgium (http://www.ngi.be/FR/FR1-5-2.shtm or 
> http://www.ngi.be/NL/NL1-5-2.shtm if you speak Dutch), I see it offers a 
> digital ArcInfo dataset and also a DWG formatted dataset for 300 euros.

The readOGR() function in the rgdal package will read Arc-info coverages. 
But beware of too much detail - my guess is that Admin-v-gen will suit you 
better unless you really need the most detailed administrative boundaries. 
This is also available for ArcInfo coverages, cheaper too, though the 
price doesn't compete with US or Canadian prices for public data of 
administrative boundaries, I'm afraid.

In any case, you can check the format drivers in rgdal with ogrDrivers(). 
You need more insight into the GIS formats for coverages and DXF/DWG than 
for shapefiles - the incantations are not easy - so getting a friendly GIS 
colleague to convert the boundaries you need to a shapefile might save you 
learning things you don't strictly need to.

Roger

> My objective is to make some kind of plot like in Rnews Volume 5/2, 
> November 2005, Figure 3 on page 12 
> (http://www.r-project.org/doc/Rnews/Rnews_2005-2.pdf) but not for North 
> Carolina but for Belgium and later on to do some more advanced spatial 
> statistics. Can I do this with the ArcInfo or the DWG file offered at 
> that website or do I really need a ESRI shapefile to do that kind of 
> plotting as explained in Rnews?
>
> thanks in advance,
> Jan Wijffels
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-- 
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