[R-sig-Geo] GIS Tasks in R

[Tim Keitt]

In addition to Rogers advise, you might take a peek at the functions
available in postgis. Once you have polys in the postgis database, you
can do quite a lot of geometry ops by eg "select intersection(poly1,
poly2) from tabname" and so on. There's some grunt work involved. Its
certainly not pointy-clicky (although QGIS and GRASS have some ability
to work with postgis). I have found some useful functions there.
Documentation is pretty good too.

THK

On 2/6/07, CJ Jackson <cwjacksonjr at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm currently working on my PhD (geology) and would like to explore the
> possible GIS capabilities of R.  I currently use ESRI's ArcView (3.x),
> ArcGIS (9.1), and ArcInfo (9) software for all of my GIS work.  I have
> written an "extension" for the old ArcView that performs various
> analyses of points/polylines/polygons and have been wanting to update
> the extension for the latest version of ArcGIS to help me solve various
> research problems.  With that being said, I discovered 'R' last year and
> fell in love with it and have been using it for data analysis of
> attribute tables from GIS Shapefiles.  Ultimately, as part of my
> research, I would like to make a package for R that would handle various
> GIS tasks of shapefiles themselves, not just their data tables.  It
> would be great to have a analysis package for my research that is not
> solely dependent on ESRI's software.  Furthermore, I dread programming
> in Visual Basic for the new ArcGIS because I have limited programming
> skills.  Here are some of the tasks I would like to perform:
>
> - produce a new point shapefile that contains points where two or more
> shapefiles with polylines intersect
> - intersect two or more shapefiles with polygons and store the results
> in a new shapefile
> - calculate area of polygons
> - calculate the distance from a point shapefile to another point shapefile
>
> Is this possible in R, or, am I barking up the wrong tree?  Thanks!
>
> cj
>
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-- 
Timothy H. Keitt, University of Texas at Austin
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